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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 ...
Partly because English has never had any official regulating authority for spelling, such as the Spanish Real Academia Española, the French Académie française, the German Council for German Orthography, the Danish Sprognævn, and the Thai Royal Society, English spelling is considered irregular and complex compared to that of other languages.
English spelling consistency was dealt a further blow when William Caxton brought the printing press to London in 1476. Having lived in mainland Europe for the preceding 30 years, his grasp of the English spelling system had become uncertain. The Belgian assistants whom he brought to help him set up his business had an even poorer command of it ...
Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages. Sometimes a well-known namesake with the same spelling has a markedly different pronunciation. These are known as heterophonic names or heterophones (unlike heterographs , which are written differently but pronounced the same).
Historically, it used to be spelled as two words in the United States, but its usage is diminishing; nevertheless it is a variant spelling in American English today. The spelling difference is reflected in the style guides of newspapers and other media agencies in the US, Ireland, and countries of the Commonwealth of Nations.
So whether the sound [k] is written with the letters "c" or "k" in I.T.A. depends on the way the sound is written in standard English spelling, as also whether the sound [z] is written with the ordinary "z" letter or with a special backwards "z" letter (which replaces the "s" of standard spelling where it represents a voiced sound, and which ...
Formation of new words, called neologisms, based on Greek and/or Latin roots (for example television or optometry) is a highly productive process in English and in most modern European languages, so much so that it is often difficult to determine in which language a neologism originated.
Related: See images from the 2016 National Spelling Bee: Virginia, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Pennsylvania seem to be home to some flaky people. Cancelled was the most looked up word in all four ...