English Spelling: A Creative Mix

English spelling is such a mixture because of several factors:

1. The English language has borrowed a huge number of words from all over the world, and continues to do so. And so we have 'chemical' from Greek, 'chalet' from French, 'tchotchkes' from Russian, 'gnocchi' from Italian—all importing their own twists on the pronunciation of 'ch' and the spelling of /k/ or /sh/ or /ch/.
2. Starting in the 14th century, words were spelled as they were originally upon import in order to preserve their origins. Before that time, though, everyone spelled English words every which way—sometimes within their own writing—until scribes got caught up in the 14th century enthusiasm for things neoclassical and started to trace words to their origins and respell them to fit. Thus 'nacioun' became 'nation'. While they were at it, the scribes also set some constraints on legal letter combinations. Thus 'gg', for instance, is not used to denote a /jh/ sound at the end of a word—which is why we use 'dg' for this purpose instead.
3. Some of the different spellings we have for the same sound exist because originally the sounds were pronounced differently. For instance, 'ee' and 'ea' had different pronunciations until the end of the 17th century. But by that time, the spellings of the words containing this newly unified sound had stabilized, so the dual spellings persevered.
4. The Great Vowel Shift. Mostly in the 15th century, but really spanning several centuries around that time, the long vowels shifted from their continental pronunciations (more like Spanish or French) to their current pronunciations. Thus we have vowels that have at least two pronunciations, depending on whether they're short (such as 'limb') or long (such as 'lime'). The letter 'o' alone is responsible for at least 9 different sounds ('tot', 'vote', 'toot', 'book', 'ton', 'town', 'boy', 'pour', 'lesson').

The good news is that despite these factors, there are some overarching regularities that have very few exceptions:

• For the most part, English orthography respects the order in which the phonemes of a word are pronounced. So there is a one-to-one mapping of letters and letter combinations onto sounds. (There are few exceptions, among them the -le and -re in words like 'able' and 'ogre'.)
• In the majority of cases, all the letters in an English word have a function. If a letter isn't pronounced, it either informs the sound of another letter, such as the silent 'e' in 'cute', or the 'i' in '-tion', or it preserves a word's derivation or meaning and is often pronounced when a prefix or suffix is added; for instance: autumn/autumnal. Thus the same meaningful word part (the morpheme) is spelled the same though pronunciation changes across derivations. (As always, there are exceptions in which letter function is muddled, such as 'eighth'.)

The English writing system, by striking a compromise between representing sound and meaning, facilitates word recognition for the fluent English speaker. In doing so, written English becomes something more than written speech; it is a map of the jungle of words and of their history. Thus written material is sometimes easier for the fluent reader to understand than is the spoken language it transcribes.