English spelling makes no sense. Excessive homonyms and homophones, letters in seemingly arbitrary places, and rules riddled with exceptions. It’s a wonder we can even communicate at all.
Right?
Kind of. It’s a wonder humans can communicate with any language. The brain possesses remarkable skill. But English isn’t an inherently bad system, allowing English speakers somehow to rise, triumphant, over obstacles. What we find in our words actually makes quite a bit of sense.
The basic unit of English is a phoneme, a.k.a. a single sound in a word. For example, the word “dog” has three phonemes- the d sound, the o sound, and the g sound. The simplest way to show language would seem to have a letter for each phoneme. Sound corresponds to letter. Logic. But words like foreign, wrought, and of don’t do this.
So right away one might say our language has that failing. But what about accents? If people in Maine and in Tennessee and in New Zealand all spelled words how they said them, there would be distinct differences, some to the point of unintelligibility.
English used to have a very phonemic writing style, where everything was said as it was written. But this system was created when humanity only had need for English in a localized area. We’ve evolved away from this as we’ve expanded over the globe.
In contrast to phonemes, morphemes are little word parts that each have a separate meaning. In the word “prematurely,” we find three morphemes: pre-, mature, and –ly. Morphemes greatly benefit any language system because they show connections between words. Whenever you see the root word “break” or the suffix –ology, you can take an educated guess at the meaning of the unfamiliar word.
English spelling relies heavily on morphemes. A side effect from this is that spelling preserves some letters that we don’t say today. Silly, maybe, but rooted in helping brains grasp the meanings of words a little bit faster.
Is English confusing to learn? Yes. Could it be improved? Absolutely. But is it terrible and nonsensical? Definitely not.
It’s worth noting that language is always changing. Just look at chatspeak. Society has created words like “luv” because that’s how “love” sounds! Maybe culture will shift back from morphemes and more toward phonemes. Who knows? We’re in a constant state of flux, and those who try to understand language can only hope to hang on for dear life and enjoy the ride.