A Survey of English Spelling A Survey of English Spelling Edward Carney London and New York First published 1994 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX 14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge Inc. 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Transferred to Digital Printing 2006 © 1994 Edward Carney Typeset in 10/12pt Times Linotronic 300 by Florencetype Ltd, Kewstoke, Avon All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Catatoguing-in-Pubiication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0^115-09270-1 (hbk) Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xv PREFACE xvi CONVENTIONS, SYMBOLS AND TECHNICAL TERMS xx 1 ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO DESCRIBING ENGLISH SPELLING 1 1.1 A philological approach 1 How did the present system come about? 1 1.2 A functional approach 3 How does the present system work? 3 2 LITERACY AND ENGLISH SPELLING: METHODS AND PROBLEMS 5 2.1 Writing without speech 5 Can the written forms of English be described systematically without linking them to spoken forms? 5 2.2 Linking speech to writing: sounds and letters 6 Points of view 6 Classroom units 7 Finding symbols for phonemes 8 Sounds and letters: the misuse of 'vowel' and 'consonant' 9 Making spelling an authority for pronunciation 11 'Learning the alphabet' 14 2.3 Divergence 15 Departures from one-to-one correspondence 15 The temptation to overstate irregularities 16 vi A Survey of English Spelling 2.4 Lexical spelling 18 Keeping the spelling of a morpheme constant 18 Processes and underlying forms 20 An optimal orthography? The views of Venezky and Chomsky and Halle 21 An untidy alphabetic system? 24 2.5 Reading 26 What does a reader read? 26 Should spelling be taught deliberately or should it seep in? 28 Phonological awareness and taught spelling 29 What if you look, but cannot say? 30 2.6 Finding correspondences 32 Splitting the string of letters into units to match up with phonemes 32 2.6.1 Segmentation 32 Where to chop. The size of units 32 2.6.2 Simplicity 34 How many units of correspondence? 34 Complex phonemes 35 2.6.3 Exhaustiveness and discreteness 36 Remainders, overlaps and morpheme boundaries 36 2.6.4 Distinctiveness and appropriateness 38 Take it to the left, or take it to the right? 38 2.6.5 Auxiliary, inert and empty letters 40 All letters are 'silent', but some are more silent than others 40 Auxiliary letters: making do with the Roman alphabet 40 Inert letters: now you hear them, now you don't 41 Empty letters and special markers 42 Phonetic transparency and functional load 45 Transferability: using what you've got 46 Some hard cases 47 2.6.6 The punctuation of words 48 Spaces and hyphens 48 The flight from the apostrophe 50 Capital letters 51 2.7 ACCENT AND DIALECT: LITERACY IS HARDER FOR SOME 52 Contents vii 2.7.1 Differences between accents 52 Four types of difference between accents (Wells 1982) 52 Differences of phonetic realization 54 Differences of phonotactic distribution 55 Differences of phonological system 56 Differences of lexical distribution 58 2.7.2 Recognizing problems due to phonological interference 60 2.7.3 Phonological interference in Black American English 61 2.7.4 An orthography to cope with dialect variation 62 2.7.5 Stage dialect: spelling out the intentions of the playwright 63 2.8 RULES AND ERRORS 66 2.8.1 Types of rule 66 Correspondence, adaptation, graphotactic and reference rules 66 2.8.2 Classroom spelling rules 69 Reference rules used by teachers 69 2.8.3 Syllabification rules: splitting words 76 Variation in usage 76 Phonetic syllable boundaries 77 General principles and usual practice 78 2.8.4 Types of spelling error 79 Social penalties 79 Competence errors and performance errors. Variant errors. Slips 81 Lexical errors. Malapropisms 82 Analogy errors. Jumbling. Splits 84 Articulation or interference errors 84 2.8.5 'Phoneme-grapheme correspondences as cues to spelling improvement' (Hanna et at. 1966) 86 The Hanna speech-to-text algorithm 86 Spelling rules based on the 'syllable' 87 Spelling pronunciations as a mnemonic device 88 Is English spelling '50% regular'? 89 The case for understatement: is it better than 50%? 89 The case for overstatement: is it worse than 50% ? 92 An unjustified counterclaim? Simon and Simon (1973) 95 A futuristic algorithm for 'word recognition' 95 viii A Survey of English Spelling 2.9 SPELLING SUBSYSTEMS AND LITERACY 96 2.9.1 Native and foreign 96 English spelling as a system of subsystems 96 2.9.2 Subsystem markers 97 Albrow's (1972) three-system model 97 Observable markers 100 2.9.3 Awareness 102 Phonological awareness, system awareness and lexical awareness 102 3 SPEECH-TO-TEXT CORRESPONDENCES: ENCODING 104 3.1 A corpus-based study 104 3.1.1 The database 104 3.1.2 Analysis of correspondences 107 3.1.3 Text frequency and lexical frequency 109 3.2 GENERAL FACTORS IN SPEECH-TO-TEXT RULES 112 3.2.1 Common features of spelling correspondences 112 3.2.2 Consonant-letter doubling 112 Marking short vowels: matting-mating 114 §Latinate prefixes: approve, immerse, offend 119 Consonant letters that double 120 Marking stressed short vowels 121 <C>-doubling after vowels lacking primary stress 121 Absence of <C>-doubling before a word boundary 123 Absence of <C>-doubling in three-syllable words 123 Absence of <C>-doubling before certain endings 123 <C>-doubling and the constant morpheme shape 124 <C>-doubling before inverted <le> in §Basic words: mettle, meddle 124 <C>-doubling after 'new' long vowels: /a:/, h-J and /a:/. 124 Graphotactic restrictions on <C>-doubling 124 A trial run: instances of <bb> 125 3.2.3 <e>-marking functions 129 Marking long vowels 129 Marking stem-final /s/, Izl and IQI 129 Contents ix Marking word-final stressed<-CCe> in French loan-words 129 3.2.4 Deletion of the final <e> marker in derived forms 130 3.2.5 The 'short word rule' 131 Lexical words usually have a minimum of three letters 131 3.3 Speech-to-text correspondences phoneme by phoneme 134 3.3.1 Short vowels: /i e a; u A D/ 135 .1 /i/ as in bit ('short <i>') 135 .2 Id as in bet ('short <e>') 141 .3 Ixl as in bat ('short <a>') 143 .4 fut as in put ('short <u>') 144 .5 /A/ as in putt ('low short <u>') 147 .6 /D/ as in pot ('short <o>') 149 3.3.2 Long phonological counterparts of the short vowels: /ai i: ei auau/ 151 .1 /ai/ as in like ('long <i>') 151 .2 Iv.l as in leak (Hong <e>') 155 .3 lei/ as in lake ('long <a>') 164 .4 /au/ as in clown 169 .5 /au/ as in clone ('long <o>') 171 3.3.3 Long vowels associated with IMh fa: a: x ra es (j)i»/ 177 .1 /a:/ as in carf, ca/m 177 .2 /:>:/ as in court, caught 181 .3 / :/ as in curt 186 3 .4 /ra/ as in fe<?r, «/ea 190 .5 /es/ as in lair 192 .6 /t»/ as in lure, /jua/ as in cwre 194 3.3.4 Other long vowels: /u! jot 3i/ 196 .1 /u;/ as in booty ('simple long <u>') 196 2/)\i:/ as in beauty ('complex long <u>') 200 .3 hil as in boy 202 3.3.5 hi and vowel reduction 203 3.3.6 Stop consonants:/p b t d k g tf (fc/ 210 .l/p/asinpan 210 .2/b/asinfcan 211 .3 III as in tame 212 .4 /d7 as in dame 214 .5 /k/ as in came 216 .6 /g/ as in game 223