Notes

The English language came into being around AD 450. Three tribes from Northern Europe-the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes-invaded the British Isles. The main island came to be known as jolly old "Angle" land (England), and the language that came into being became known as Anglo- Saxon or Old English. Every one of the top 100 most fre- quently used words in English today comes from Old English.

In about AD 600, the language began to change because St. Augustine came to Britain, bringing Christianity along and a lot of Latin words. People started learning to write in Eng- lish, and so English spelling was invented.

But then more invasions brought more new words into English. The Viking invasions began in the late 700s, bringing Danish words. Then, in 1066, came William the Conqueror and the Normans, bringing French words. After a couple of hundred years, the difference that resulted from the addi- tion of French had become so great that the change in the language become popular. The mixture of Old English with French that was spoken starting in the early 1200s is called Middle English. Just to let you know how that influence has lasted, about 40% of all English words used today have French origins. The rediscovery of Greek and Latin classics in the period of Renaissance (1300s- 1600s) and the introduction of the printing press in the 1400s brought many new words to England. All these new additions to the language kept things very unsettled until the mid-1700s, when English spelling began to become standardized as a result of the pub- lication of a definitive dictionary by Samuel Johnson-and this is when Modern English began.

For years and years, nobody thought that spelling the same word in different ways was such a problem. Spelling of English started to become regular in the 1600s to 1700s.

In the 1970s, Lee C. Deighton compared four of the major American English diction- aries and found considerable disagreement about the "right" way to spell several thou- sand common English words. As you have seen, even the experts can't agree on how to spell a large number of words correctly. In addition, new words are added to English as people create new concepts and invent equipment with new names and as slang terms and phrases arise.

Understanding a little about the sources of English will help you understand why there are several different patterns of spelling in modern English. Each language of origin has its own rules for representing sounds with letters. In addition, the pronunciation of English has changed over time. So sounds are not represented by letters in English in a one-to-one correspondence.