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STORY: Why is English so hard to spell?There are clear differences between how words are written and how they are said.If English is your first language you may not realize it’s not that normal ...
A one-letter word is a word composed of a single letter. The application of this apparently simple definition is complex, due to the difficulty of defining the notions of word and letter. One-letter words have an uncertain status in language theory, dictionaries and social usage.
This only further complicates the spelling, however. On the one hand, words that retained anglicised spellings may be misread in a hyperforeign way. On the other hand, words that are respelled in a 'foreign' way may be misread as if they are English words, e.g. Muslim was formerly spelled Mooslim because of its original pronunciation.
The orthographic depth of an alphabetic orthography indicates the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter–phoneme correspondence. It depends on how easy it is to predict the pronunciation of a word based on its spelling: shallow orthographies are easy to pronounce based on the written word, and deep orthographies are difficult to pronounce based on how they ...
The irregular spelling of very common words, such as are, have, done, of, would makes it difficult to fix them without introducing a noticeable change to the appearance of English text. English is the only one of the top ten major languages with no associated worldwide regulatory body with the power to promulgate spelling changes.
Whereas the names of many letters sound alike, the set of replacement words can be selected to be as distinct from each other as possible, to minimise the likelihood of ambiguity or mistaking one letter for another. For example, if a burst of static cuts off the start of an English-language utterance of the letter J, it may be mistaken for A or K.
We're all guilty of Googling how to spell a word we were taught back in 4th grade, but no longer remember. Well, just to rub it in, using search queries beginning with "how to spell" followed by a ...
The California Job Case was a compartmentalized box for printing in the 19th century, sizes corresponding to the commonality of letters. The frequency of letters in text has been studied for use in cryptanalysis, and frequency analysis in particular, dating back to the Arab mathematician al-Kindi (c. AD 801–873 ), who formally developed the method (the ciphers breakable by this technique go ...