English spelling is not as bad as advertised. I went on the @grammargirl.bsky.social podcast to make the case for the messy, chaotic, amazing English spelling system.

Mignon Fogarty@grammargirl.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Ever wonder why English spelling is so chaotic? @colingorrie.bsky.social of the fabulous Dead Language Society newsletter and I chatted about the hidden logic behind silent letters, and he explained why "ghoti" ≠ "fish." Apple: is.gd/Id2olW Spotify: is.gd/eaWr6k

A green man rides into King Arthur’s court. Green skin, green clothes, green horse. He offers a game: any knight may swing his axe if he’ll accept a return blow in a year. Gawain takes the deal. The head comes off… then the body picks it up and rides away.

Linguists tend to talk about “Middle English” like it was one thing (myself included). But Middle English was the most diverse period in the history of the language. If you only know “The Canterbury Tales,” you've only seen one kind of Middle English.

The surnames "Menzies" and "Mackenzie" were never meant to be pronounced with a 'z.' The original spellings used the medieval yetter yogh, which looked like this: ȝ Yogh once represented a 'y' sound in both English and Scots. So the name "Mackenȝie" was actually pronounced like "Mackenyie."

"Pound," "street," and "cheap" are Latin words in disguise. They come from "pondo" (by weight), "strata" (paved), and "caupo" (innkeeper). They look nothing like the long, fancy words we normally associate with Latin borrowings: "formula," "curriculum," "decimation." What's going on here?

Around 80% of English words were borrowed from other languages. You can often work out where a word was borrowed from (and when!) just by looking at it. It works because words carry visible stamps of where they come from: suffixes, silent letters, even stress patterns. These also map onto dates.

Here are four words: knight, courage, fabricate, hypothesis. Without looking anything up, you can tell: - What language each word came from - Roughly when it entered the English language How?

"Ought" is the past tense of "owe." At least, it was originally. Both words come from he Old English verb "āgan," which meant 'to have.' The ‘owe’ meaning comes from a phrase "āgan tō ġieldenne" 'to have (something) to pay.' Eventually, we dropped the "tō ġieldenne" 'to pay' portion.

Linguists can reconstruct long-dead languages that no one ever wrote down. These reconstructions can be surprisingly precise: individual words, grammar, sound changes, even something of the world the speakers inhabited. But how?

English is full of mysteries hiding in ordinary words. The verb "to be" is one of the strangest. Its forms "is," "was," "be," look nothing alike, as if the word had been assembled from spare parts. It was.

The verb "to be" is three completely unrelated words stitched together. "Was" comes from an ancient root meaning ‘to spend the night.’ "Is" comes from a different root entirely. "Be" comes from yet a third (the same one that gives us "physics" and "future").

The word "dog" is something of a mystery. All of English’s relatives have something like "hound": German has "Hund," Dutch has "hond," Swedish has "hund." Yet only English has a word like "dog." Why?

This week I wrote about three things Shakespeare’s English gave him that our English no longer provides. One of them was the coexistence of "I know not" and "I do not know." This was a choice between competing grammatical constructions, but it had consequence for the poetic metre.

In a study of the vocabulary range of thirteen Elizabethan playwrights, Shakespeare ranked… seventh, behind writers most of us have never heard of. Yet read these other writers (say, John Webster or George Chapman) and you’ll see instantly that Shakespeare is special. But why?

The English Renaissance must have been an interesting time to be alive. I mean, linguistically. (Not a fan of plagues.) Between 1500 and 1650, English was on a kind of sugar high, as thousands of new Latin words flooded into the language.

Here’s an experiment for you to try. If someone said “I made eggs for breakfast” but you didn’t hear the word “eggs,” you could ask for clarification: “What did you make?“ But if that person said “I made ham and eggs for breakfast” and you didn’t hear the word “eggs”, what would you ask?

If I could wave a magic wand and banish one misconception about Shakespeare's English, it would be that "thou" is just an old-fashioned version of "you." In Elizabethan English, "thou" was less old-fashioned than socially charged. "Thou" had two seemingly contradictory connotations.

The stories we tell about the history of English are shaped as much by what was burned, thrown away, or eaten by worms as by what anyone actually wrote. Beowulf barely survived into the modern period: it comes down to us in a single, slightly scorched manuscript. It's not just a medieval problem..

How many words did Shakespeare invent? Ask Google and you’ll get the standard answer: about 1,700. But that number is almost certainly too high.

English doesn’t come from Latin. Instead, they’re cousins, both descended from the same ancient ancestor. Which makes this parallel genuinely strange: the Latin negative word “nōn” and the English word “none” are the same compound, built completely independently.

The first person to try reforming English spelling was a 12th-century priest named Orm. His system: double every consonant after a short vowel. "God" became "Godd." His own name became "Orrm." He wrote an entire book this way, but his system was never copied. Later reforms were even more drastic.

Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle once called English spelling "a near optimal system." Given the reputation of English spelling, you might think they were being ironic. Far from it.

There’s a famous joke: English spelling is so broken that “ghoti” can spell “fish.” ‘Gh’ as in “enough,” ‘o’ as in “women,” ‘ti’ as in “nation.” It’s meant to show that English spelling makes no sense. But it actually shows the opposite.

For a stretch of medieval England, “he” and “she” were the same word. The two words started out separate: Old English “hē” (he) and “hēo” (she). But around 1100, they merged into identical “he.” In parts of England, they stayed that way. But not in the dialects that became Standard English.

This might be the only conversation ever recorded in both Old English and Ancient Greek youtu.be/2sSS5YxMnbQ?...

Old English vs. Ancient Greek - a chat with Colin Gorrie & Luke Ranieri

YouTube video by ScorpioMartianus

youtu.be

This week I wrote about how the printing press triggered a panic over Latin loanwords in the 16th century. But the printing press did something else to English: it caused much of the chaos that haunts English spelling to this day. All because it arrived just a little too early.

Almost 500 years ago, a group of English writers decided Latin and French loanwords were corrupting the language. They wanted to replace them all with "pure English" alternatives. If they'd won, Hamlet would have wondered "To be or not to be, that is the asking."

Are you editing em-dashes out of your prose? Leaving “artisanal” typos in your articles as proof of humanity? No one wants their writing mistaken for “AI slop.” But in avoiding that charge, we risk surrendering some of the best tools in the literary tradition. Full story out tomorrow.

Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die: Why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong (mostly) open.substack.com/pub/colingor...

Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong

open.substack.com

In the 1550s, a group of purists decided Latin loanwords were corrupting the English language. Their solution was to coin “pure English” replacements. Some of their proposals were pretty weird.