"Spelling should be pensioned off," the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude recommended, "it terrorizes human beings from birth."
One wonders what the late Nobel Laureate would have said about English pronunciation. The litany of complaints against the latter shows no sign of abatement. Recently, a friend of mine, in a rare fit of confession, owned up that she had been wrong about her pronunciation of the word 'epitome', rhyming tome with stone and not with tummy- till an Anglophile tourist guide at a Greek ruin corrected her. Another admitted that the stubborn "P" 'mocks, burlesques ( I learnt a new word!) and levels phthisis, psychology,pthonic and pterosaur'. A friend who teaches English bemoaned that even knowledge of the origin of the words did not help much - though they were borrowed from French, the words change, charge and chimney are pronounced differently from champagne, chevron, and chivalry.
For most Indians, exposed to languages in which the basic written symbols or graphemes are quite consistent with the basic sounds or phonemes ( like r in ring or a in ago), the main function of the written word or orthography was to reduce in print how and what we speak . But the English had other designs for their orthography - for them it was more of a canvas to paint the many facets of their personality and depict their history. In the process, if it helped pronunciation it was incidental , if it did not, well, it was collateral damage.
It seems that for the better part of its history, English evolved in a manner that best describes life in a hostel of raucous boarders without regular wardens- utter chaos and confusion. There was no language synod such as the Spanish Real Academia Espanola or the French Academie francaise , no equivalent of Panini's Ashtadhyayi. Actually, Britian itself was ruled for 300 years beginning 1066 AD by French monarchs from Normandy who did not speak English!
Actually, this Norman French rule had substantially Frenchified English by adding almost 10,000 words , greatly altered its spellings and pronunciation, and pushed it to the countryside from the court where it broke up into at least four dialects. That the English took as much as 500 years to inflict a Waterloo on the French speaks of their remarkable sang froid . And what is more astonishing, if you ask me, is how English, from such a chaotic start, could evolve into a world language and have strict Grammar Nazis , glaring in a mother in law sort of disapproving way and sniping, in clipped accents, at fumblers of its spellings, pronunciation and syntax.
When the English collected their horses to put the language back on track after circa 1350, the lack of a Central control informed the course they took. The fairly consistent spelling system which the Father of Modern English Chaucer had attempted to give, was diluted and changed to more phonically baffling versions by the Chancery clerks who were more comfortable with French. The dialectical laissez faire meant that when English rushed in to occupy the space vacated by the Norman, people often adopted spelling of one dialect and the pronunciation of another- the Western England spelling of busy and bury were given the London pronunciation of bizzy and the Kentish berry respectively.
The first attempts to freeze the spellings started with the introduction of the printing press by William Caxton and his Belgian assistants from 1476 onwards and the printing of the Bibles in English later on. And after their spellings started to get fixed with whatever little consistency with speech they could , the English were subjected to a revolutionary linguistic development between 1350 and 1700.
This development is called the Great Vowel Shift (GVS)- that is to say, the English, after fixing the spellings, proceeded to change the manner in which some long vowels were to be stressed, leaving the short vowels untouched. This made pronunciation more idiosyncratic than ever before. What was pronounced as mees in Middle English became mice; moos, mice; fate, feet; dough, do; nahm, name and saw became so. But these vowel changes took different shapes depending on their positioning of consonants around them- so hoose became house but doom did not become doume nor scoop scoupe and boob boube. This was because the change in stress of oo to ou did not occur when placed before labial consonants like m, p, b. Processes like trisyllabic laxing and mergers started.
Labial Consonants!! Trisyllabic laxing!! Mergers!!This is getting to be highly technical but just remember when anyone asks you why the pairs mane - main, bred- bread, vein -vain sound similar, why the ante-penultimate syllable in child-children, divine-divinity, mine-mineral sound dissimilar, why the final e was lost so that made was no more pronounced mah-duh, just raise your hand, stand up, say " due to the GVC" and pocket the prize. And if some Smart Alec finds flaws in your argument, tell him that the English have rules and exception to rules in equal measure!
Which brings us to the very interesting question- how far can the written word keep pace with the spoken which changes ever so often? Speaking is not only imprecise, it is also affected by many other considerations- fashion, peer pressure, etc. And where is the guarantee that after we have corrected spelling to be consistent with pronunciation, the latter will not change again? It is dance today, tomorrow it could be daahnce. Darling today, daahling tomorrow. There are already so many pronounced differences in speaking amongst the English- the Scots, Americans, Australians- and if you hop across to communities who speak English as their second language, changes could 'maardaar' the language and end up as 'berry beeg mishtaksh'.
Of course, English language reforms, the ones aimed at speaking the way we write, may have met with partial success and enabled us to arrive at our present pronunciation of waistcoat and forehead from the earlier weskit and forrid, but overall, spelling reforms, especially changing spellings to as the way we speak have been unfortunately, and if you will pardon me, as ineffective as AAP's political reforms in India. And anyway, you cannot take away k from knew and still not confuse it with new.
Infact, one of the lessons to be learnt from the success of English has been that there cannot be a guarantee that a high degree of spelling - pronunciation consistency will make a language easy to learn and become popular- Sanskrit which has about the most phonemic of the known orthographies would not have been a dead language which it is almost today and Bengali ,which is not so phonemic, would not have been the second largest spoken language in the Indian sub continent. Another lesson is that the absence of a Central authority would not necessarily jeopardise the growth of a language but could actually give it a flexibility to,what a friend of mine says, "borrow, adapt, adopt, swerve, manoeuvre, negotiate, etc" - qualities needed in a language to grow and prosper.
A final word of advice - when in doubt about how to pronounce a word, ask someone. You cannot be expected to know that in Loughborough, the first ough sounds as in cuff while the second rhymes with thorough, and that Leveson- Gower could be 'loosen gore'. And take comfort from the fact that the BBC itself employs a team of dedicated othoepists ( professional pronouncers) so that broadcasters do not bungle - you are not alone in this choppy sea.
