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English is a West Germanic language that has borrowed many words from non-Germanic languages, and the spelling of a word often reflects its origin. This sometimes gives a clue as to the meaning of the word. Even if their pronunciation has strayed from the original pronunciation, the spelling is a record of the phoneme.
The Simplified Spelling Board was an American organization created in 1906 to reform the spelling of the English language, making it simpler and easier to learn, and eliminating many of what were considered to be its inconsistencies. The board operated until 1920, the year after the death of its founding benefactor, who had come to criticize ...
During the second half of the 20th century, the prescriptivist tradition of usage commentators started to fall under increasing criticism. Thus, works such as the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, appearing in 1993, attempt to describe usage issues of words and syntax as they are actually used by writers of note, rather than to judge them by standards derived from logic, fine ...
Middle English was spoken to the late 15th century. The system of orthography that was established during the Middle English period is largely still in use today. Later changes in pronunciation, combined with the adoption of various foreign spellings, mean that the spelling of modern English words appears highly irregular.
Spelling is easier in languages with more or less consistent spelling systems, such as Finnish, Serbian, Italian and Spanish, owing either to the fact that pronunciation in these languages has changed relatively little since the establishment of their spelling systems, or the fact that non-phonemic etymological spellings have been replaced with ...
Early Modern English (sometimes abbreviated EModE [1] or EMnE) or Early New English (ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transition from Middle English, in the late 15th century, to the transition to Modern English, in the mid-to-late 17th century.
Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. [1] Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element. Spellings originated as transcriptions of the sounds of speech according to the alphabetic principle.
But due to changes over time, a knowledge of the history of the word in question is needed to predict the pronunciation with certainty. In word-final position, the pronunciation of sċ was either /ʃ/ or possibly /ʃː/ when the preceding vowel was short. [34] sċ /ʃː/ (between vowels), /ʃ/ (elsewhere) t /t/ th /θ/