Writing
one-sound-one-symbol principle, but not with as much effect as the “silent” final -e of so many English words. Not only do we have to learn that this letter is not pronounced, we also have to know the patterns of influence it has on the preceding vowel, as in the different pronunciations of “a” in the pair hat/hate and “o” in not/note. If we then add in the fact that a large number of older written English words were actually “recreated” by sixteenth-century spelling reformers to bring their written forms more into line with what were supposed, sometimes erroneously, to be their Latin origins (e.g. dette became debt, doute became doubt, iland became island), then the sources of the mismatch between written and spoken forms begin to become clear. Even when the revolutionary American spelling reformer Noah Webster was successful (in the USA) in revising a form such as British English honour, he only managed to go as far as honor (and not onor). His proposed revisions of bred (for bread), giv (for give) and laf (for laugh) were in line with the alphabetic principle, and are often the preferred forms of young children learning to write English, but they have obviously not found their way into everyday printed English. In the next chapter we will look more closely at the historical development of English and other ways in which languages change.
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