Baffling sound of English

By Lee Hyon-soo

I have been living in an English-speaking country for decades. Nevertheless, I am somewhat ill at ease when I speak English. My problem is pronunciation of English words. I unwittingly mispronounce English words from time to time. I blame it on the fact that English words are not pronounced as they are spelled. English is not a phonetic language. All vowels and many consonants are pronounced in more ways than one, while many words contain silent consonants.

English spelling is etymological rather than phonetic. Put another way, English words are spelled according to their historical form rather than their present sound. To understand why English is the way it is, we need to trace its evolution. A brief history of English follows (based on a book titled "The Facts of English" by Ronald Ridout and Clifford Witting).

Britain was initially inhabited by the Celts speaking Celtic. But they were invaded in 55 B.C. by the Romans, who ruled the country for several centuries. However, very few Latin words from this period remain in the present English language, and those few were mostly left behind in the names of places.

After Germanic peoples ― the Saxons and the Angles ― invaded Britain in the 5th century, the Celts mostly fled to Wales, Cornwall and Scotland where the Celtic language survived. The invaders established their own language, taking over very little of Celtic and Latin. This language was Anglo-Saxon or Old English.

Although Old English remained at the center of the growing English language, it was continuously modified by a succession of further invasions. The first of these invasions was the arrival of Christianity from Rome in around A.D. 600. As a result, Old English acquired many Latin words of a religious character, for which no native words existed.

Toward the end of the 8th century the Danish Vikings started invading the east coast of England. Within a hundred years their settlements grew numerous. The Vikings were absorbed into the life of the Anglo-Saxons and so was their language. In exchange the Danish language gave the English language many new words and altered the pronunciation of many more.

The next invasion was more far-reaching. William of Normandy conquered England in 1066. For nearly 300 years Norman French was the language of the English court, nobility, law courts, learned professions and schools. But the common people and many of the remaining Anglo-Saxon nobles went on speaking Old English. Therefore, there were two languages spoken from 1066 till the early 14th century. But as the Normans became cut off from France and intermarried with the Anglo-Saxons, the two languages mingled and became Middle English, which owed many hundreds of words to Norman French.

The full tide of the Renaissance, which was based on the rediscovered Greek and Lain classics, reached England in about 1500. This invasion brought with it a flood of Greek and Latin words, many of which soon became permanently absorbed into English.

By the time the English language digested its Renaissance borrowings in the middle of the 17th century, it more or less took on its present form. In general, the language from then on is essentially Modern English.

As outlined above, English borrowed freely from other languages. And the influx of great numbers of foreign words of diverse origins enriched English vocabulary but made English spellings and pronunciation overly complex. To make matters worse, while English spellings were finally fixed in the 18th century, pronunciation has since changed considerably – so much so that today English spellings are remote from their pronunciation.

Obviously there is no easy way for non-native speakers to master English pronunciation. We need to learn to pronounce each and every English word correctly. What an onerous task it is for us!

The writer is a retired international banker who lives in Toronto, Canada. His other writings are posted on http://blog.daum.net/tom_hslee.

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