How a word’s place of origin affected its spelling. He mentions that the ideal phonetic alphabet has one letter for each sound, unlike English in which some “letters had more than one sounds, and some sounds were shown by more than one letter”. The only rule I do remember is the old i before e except after c one…and it turns out that this is wrong! Eight, weird, weigh, neighbor, vein, veil… I think this is an excellent example of how much better this could be as an enhanced book with audio using a choice of either Received Pronunciation or General America! Especially when he talks about short and long vowel sounds and the various sounds that were used to pronounce words.Ĭrystal provides a plethora of reasons as to why it is so difficult to create rules to explain how to spell anything. He uses these phonemes throughout the book, and it’s just impossible to remember them. I suspect I’d’a gotten a nasty headache! There are so many permutations, considerations, possibilities, dialects…and changes(!) that have and will continue to have an effect on words and how they’re spelled.Įngland began using runes to represent thoughts and writings, but Christianity couldn’t accept pagan markings, and it chose to use Latin and the Latin alphabet as the base for English spellings.Ĭrystal does provide a “chart” of the consonant and vowel phonemes to show how certain consonants and vowels are pronounced - and I strongly endorse Crystal’s suggestion to bookmark these pages. And, as much as I adore words and language, I am so grateful I wasn’t one of them. I’d never really thought about how spelling evolved, how people went about putting letters together to make a visual representation of the sound of any particular word. Zar” which proves the uselessness of a spellchecker: Yup, Crystal includes “the first two stanzas of an ode to a spelling checker by Mark Eckman and Jerrold H. And completely amused with their efforts, frustrations, and Crystal’s writing!

This was excellent with Spell It Out being easy and fun to read! I am so impressed with the work that has been done over the centuries in figuring out how to spell words in English. Explore it on Goodreads or AmazonĪ history and explanation on how English came to be spelled and the issues involved. Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling by David Crystalīusiness in Hardcover edition that was published by St.

This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I received this book for free from the library in exchange for an honest review.

Spell It Out by David Crystal