99% Invisible - 460- Corpse, Corps, Horse and Worse

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

When it comes to English spelling and pronunciation, there is plenty of rhyme and very little reason. But what is the reason for that? Why among all European languages is English so uniquely chaotic today?To help us answer that question, we spoke with linguist and longtime friend of the show, Arika Okrent, author of the new book Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language. In it, Arika explores the origins of those phonetic paradoxes, and it turns out some of the reasons for confusion are as counterintuitive as the words themselves.Corpse, Corps, Horse and Worse

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1920, a Dutch writer named Rard Nolst Trenetet published a poem in English titled The Chaos. It's theme, spelling, specifically English spelling and pronunciation, and all the chaos it has let loose upon the world, it begins. Dearest creature in creation, studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse sounds like corpse, core, horse, and worse. I will make you, Susie, busy. Make your head with heat grow dizzy.

Just compare heart, hear, and heard, dies, and die at, Lord, and Word. And that's just the opening lines. The full poem goes on for another 66 stances. Tryna-te design the poem as a pronunciation exercise, a catchy jingle to help students of English learn what he called the languages, quote, phonetic paradoxes, but still he couldn't help but end the poem on a note of despair. Which rhymes with enough, though through plow, cough, hoof, or tough, hiccup as the sound of sup. My advice is, give it up. The absurdity of this poem works because let's face it, when it comes to English spelling

and pronunciation, there is plenty of rhyme and very little reason. But what is the reason for that? Why among all European languages is English so uniquely chaotic today? To help us answer that question, we're talking to linguist in long time in front of the show, Erika O'Krant, author of the new book, Highly Irregular. Why tough, through, and doe, don't rhyme, and other oddities of the English language. In it, Erika explores the origins of those phonetic paradoxes, and it turns out that some of the English language. In it, Erika explores the origins of those phonetic paradoxes, and it turns out that some of the reasons for the confusion are as counterintuitive as the words themselves. Erika, welcome back to 99 and I'm FI. Thanks so much. It's great to be here.

So Erika, what is going on? English is notoriously screwy, but what happened to make our language, or at least the written language, so ridiculous? Well, I should say, I don't know if I mentioned this, the original working title of the book was, What the Hell English? And that's sort of the, that's the mood of it. That's the, that's the emotion that we're doing here. What the Hell English? Why are you like this? Why are you so weird? And you might say there's two broad reasons. One reason is that there have been a lot of people over the years who have intentionally tried to improve the language by improving its vocabulary or improving the spelling in various ways. And then most of those attempts kind of backfired and just made things more confusing. But the even bigger reason written English is so inconsistent is actually something that happened

more accidentally. And that was the introduction of the printing press to England in the 15th century, which is ironic because you'd think, of course, that the printing press would help make spelling more consistent. But in the case of English, that the printing press would help make spelling more consistent. But in the case of English, it had the opposite effect. So, let's talk about this introduction of the printing press at the moment that it hit the English language. How did the first press that was make it to England? Well, the first printing press brought to England was brought by William Caxton.

He was a merchant and he wasn't, you know, of the upper, upper classes, but he was working in Belgium and Bruges and he found this printing technology, which was very new at the time. He grabbed onto it and printed a popular English translation that he had done of this, the Legend of Troy, for members of the Burgundian court in the Netherlands that were English speakers. And it was light and popular and entertaining and not a big literary endeavor. It was just very popular and he spotted that business opportunity right away. Oh, if you do something fun and popular, people want it, and they'll buy it, and that's a merchant's dream. So he brought the Flamish-speaking typesetters that he had been

working with from Bruges and started printing English books in England. So when Caxson arrived back in England with his press, like you said, you'd expect it to maybe help regulate the language, but kind of the opposite happened. So what was it about English at this moment in the 15th century that made it not play nice with the printing press, like as opposed to other languages? Well, the way to think about it is that all languages from time to time go through big changes. Languages everywhere are always changing in the way they're spoken and written, but what happened with most other European languages is that their big shifts either happened before

or after the printing press arrived. And if your language goes through a big change before the printing press arrives, that's okay because the changes are happened, they've been completed, and now the writing that you establish can reflect how you speak it now, the changes are done. And if your language goes through its big change after the printing press arrives, that's also okay because the way it's written will then reflect the older system. It might lose some word endings, some letters go silent, some sounds that are no longer pronounced, but even if it's different from the spoken language, has its own kind of internal consistency, which makes it easier to learn. And there's

no big surprises once you've got that system down. I see. But what's really tricky is if your language is going through a big change at the same time that the printing press comes to town, that's where things get really messy. And that's what happened to English. And part of that was because spoken English was undergoing some big changes in pronunciation. But the other reason is that the rules and traditions of written English had more or less just been completely scrambled. Now, old

English had very nice, orderly spelling and a well-established tradition in literature. But that was all disrupted with the Norman invasion of 1066. The French came in, they took over all the upper echelons of society, and so writing was in French for a long time, and by the time printing was coming in in the 15th century, English had returned, but it was still on shaky ground, and it wasn't very consistent. There wasn't a book you could get and say, okay, what rule am I following here? What is the proper grammar here? What is the proper spelling here? So English was in deep flux when Caxton arrived with his press. So Caxton brings the printing press to England. He brings

his Flamish printers who are not experts in English. There's this kind of no English to be an expert of anyways. Can you describe the process of like why printing itself introduced variations in spelling? Well, when you've got a set type, it's very labor intensive while you're setting it. It buys you all kinds of time once it's set. Then you can print off as much as you like, but while you're setting it, it's very difficult. And sometimes you need to make adjustments because you want the margin to be straight, so maybe you add a letter or take a letter away. And some of the printers that Caxon brought with him were using sort of Flemish style spellings,

so they'd see a word like ghost, which would an old English be something like G-A-S-T gust. Will they spell it G-H-E-E-S-T? That's the flammish way. And so they put it in with G-H and that G-H stays for the spelling of ghost which is weird. We don't spell English words starting with G-H that have a hard guss on. That's a strange English spelling, but it perpetuated itself. That one part did, but other parts didn't. So they used to spell girl G-H-E-R-L-E or, you know, there were other other words they did this too, but those didn't catch on. But it did catch on with the word, Google. Yeah, but we didn't have the word Google when printing came in.

That was a much, much later borrowing. We borrowed from Arabic. And when we took that word in, it's, oh, it's kind of like a ghost. And it should look like, it looked like that. These two words go together and let's give a GH to that one too. And, and so this kind of accidental error takes on its own influence and then spreads to some other part of the language, but not everywhere. So that's an inconsistency. That's just going to stay there.

The double consonant also shows up with a silent W's like wrist hole, who, the silent G in that. What's going on with those, are those also sort of sourced from printing? Well, most of those come from old English. We used to pronounce them, and we pronounced those pretty far into printing so that when printing started, at that point people were still saying the W in words like, who, and rist, and the K in words like, Kno, and Knit. Although in some places they still do the WH thing if you're in the south, or in some places they say, where? Why?

Like, that's a thing that the H is there and it was there from old English. And by the time we had stopped saying those things, it was preserved in amber, so they stayed. What are some other sort of common examples of things that you still see in the written language that we just don't pronounce anymore? Or maybe we used to pronounce them and now we've just kind of lost that. Well, a big one is the other G-H that's in so many words, like tough and dough and through and night and might and right and it's everywhere in English, but there's no part of those words that has a g- or a h- sound in it at all. Why is that- what is that G-H doing?

Why is it in there? And it got into the spelling when we still were pronouncing that sound, except it wasn't a g- or a h- sound. It was a- on the fly decision made by people who had to write English and had no way of writing this really weird sound that English had and Latin didn't. There was no way to write it in the Latin alphabet. And that was a word we spell in English with a GH. So, nacht, nacht, eight, acht. Any time you lift one of these English GH spellings, you'll find a ch- in the equivalent German

word. And in some words it turned into a f sound. So k'of, laf, those were k'ach and lach. So some words became a f and some words became a nothing. Some words just dropped out and became the vowel. Like we say dough, but there is a British dessert called plum duff and that's the same word. But it's dough that became a duff sound instead of the dough sound. So the chhe became a whole bunch of different possibilities, but none of them lasted as

chhe. We just lost that sound. And one of the biggest changes going on in English in this period that you write about is something called the Great Vowel Shift, which again, it's right about the moment the brain press arrives in the 15th century. Can you describe the Great Vowel Shift? Yeah, the Great Vowel Shift is an explanation for much of the spelling problems in English, because vowels are very vague. So I can describe consonants by telling you where the obstruction happens. So a B, a B, that's the lips coming together to block the sound and then release the sound.

and then release the sound. But the description of how a vowel is, oh, well, the tongue is kind of higher in the mouth and further back, and then your lips are kind around it or not kind of, it's very hard to pin down. Here's how you make this vowel. And so vowels shift around a lot because they are, so they, in the mouth. Yeah. But English went through over the course of a few hundred years, because they are so vague in the mouth.

But English went through over the course of a few hundred years, a systematic change to the vowel system. So vowels moving from a lower position to a higher position in the mouth, and then the ones that they're bumping into as they move higher, those have to move higher too. So it's sort of a chain. And so you get shifts like bought to boat, but it's displacing boat, which means boot. So the awe moves to oh, the oh moves to ooh. And then that's displacing the u, which has nowhere to go. So it goes into diphthong land. So what used to be huss becomes house. What used to be mousse becomes mouse. But then a little

later some of them shifted around the corner to u. So buk becomes buk becomes b book, but only some places. In the north of England, they all stay at ooh, so, Luke, book, food, those all stay the same. They're not done with a vowel shift. I mean, why did the great vowel shift happen? I mean, is this just a name to put around a period of time or was there something happening that made it happen at that moment? Well, yeah, that's a big question. Some people think it had to do with the plague and the disruption of populations, the growth of London and the influx of people from various hearts of the country, but it also happened so slowly over so long a time that whatever kicked it off, we can't really say in any one instance why people who used to say mate started saying meat because it has to shift quite a bit before someone takes note and says,

hey, that's a strange pronunciation. Are you from Australia? Or, you know, but by that time, it's usually too late. So we didn't know the great vowel shift was happening when it was happening. And it's still going on. So how do you say R-O-O-F? Roof or roof? Yeah. I kind of have both of this.

I kind of say both, yeah, actually. But that is a vowel shift, that even in one person, it's not quite completed yet. And so I see why this would wreak havoc if you're trying to set the language down in print, because how would you know how to spell which sound? It sounds like it's a continuous game of whack-mull. It just calls all this variation. Exactly. Because when are you going to change the spelling when everybody's back on that

same page, or you only do it for the London speakers and not for the Scottish speakers? And the answer is is sometimes you change it, sometimes you don't, depending on when it got pushed, it's not, let's all spell it the new way. So you can't coordinate it. And then we end up with the vowel mess that we have in English. I mean, the long e-sound is particularly confounding from the list in your book. There's a me, beer, belief, leaf, seas, police, key, mosquito, people, phoenix. All of them are long e-sound. All of them are spelled different. Yeah. I know that's a long page in your mapping of sounds to spellings in English.

When we come back, we'll talk to Erica about the oddities in English for which we have only ourselves to blame. We're back with Erika Ogrant, Erika. In your book you say that in addition to all these accidental changes to the English language, that paralleling that was a series of much more deliberate changes to both words and how we use them and how they're spelled, and that just got us into more trouble. So what was going on there? How did that come about? Well, after the Norman invasion of 1066, anything official was in French.

English was a thing you did in your daily life, but it wasn't considered a language of philosophy and art and education and high pursuits. But that did start to change, and when it did, there was a sense that, oh, we got to help fix this language up. Like, we want to have English literature. We want to have English translations and English education, but the language isn't good enough. It's not real language like Latin is. We need to make it less, you know, embarrassing. And that took some conscious attention. Well, describe that. Like, what are some of the things that they did? Like, what do they try to do? Well, part of it was a massive vocabulary influx. So,

in domains like law and government and cuisine, the natural thing to do was grab the nearest French word. So, instead of writing a Germanic old English word like craft, you might write art. And so craft then becomes the lowly kind of work with the hands type situation while art is the higher pursuit. But they didn't use to have different meanings. They were real synonyms when they arrived and then they were sort of imposed on them and that bias persisted to this day in the case of art and craft. Yeah, yeah. If you would have translated it this way, but then it takes on a connotation of, well, who's using it? And what are they using it

for? They also introduced a bunch of new terms that you call incorn terms. And these are kind of neologisms that are like trying too hard. Like can you describe some of these because some of these are really fascinating. Well, when people started trying to bring English up to speed by bringing in Latin, there's a lot of Latin words that got incorporated into English words like describe, explain, introduce. But then people started going a little too far, because with Latin you can put on a prefix and a suffix and you can make new words by putting pieces together and they started coming up with words like suppeditation, the act of supplying or adubitation, the act of supplying or a dupitation, the act of questioning oneself.

There was so many of these that people started to get annoyed with them, and they were called Incorn terms, because scholars went around with these little horn belts that had ink in them for doing their scholarly writing. So it was a little bit like, these, these ink horn terms, they're filling up the language and they're too noticeable and they're trying too hard. But some of them continued in the language and now don't seem strange to us at all. Oh wow. So what are some of these Latinate words that were derided as ink horn terms for for being too complicated that nevertheless survived? Like what are some of these Latinate words that were derided as in-corn terms for being too complicated that nevertheless survive? Like what are some of those that we take for granted that were

initially considered ridiculous? Yeah, well, you think of the word incorporate. There's a lot going on there. Like it's very complicated, but it doesn't seem complicated to us anymore. We have a natural relationship to it. It doesn't sound like a duetation or, quote, motoconquizing or things like that, that were these Frankenstein terms. Someone is commoto-comquizing. That was a word, meaning every which weighing basically. But that's not one that worked out or went on. No, you don't say. Other than vocabulary being introduced to formalize the language, where there are other things like plurals, anything like that, that sort of came when the learned classes were trying to sort of civilize English.

Yeah, well, much later, English started to be pretty proud of itself. Like, now we've got Shakespeare. Now we are a real language, but there's still this insecurity, and people start to write advice books that are sort of etiquette books. Like, no, no, this is the real proper way. And a lot of that came with pronouncements using Latin grammar still. So cactus, cacti, alumnus, alumni, and you see these in educated writing. You know that's the way to form the Latin plural. So it starts to spread and then you have a word like octopus. How are you going to put that into the plural?

And octopus is as English. That's fine. It should be the English, but where you get that insecurity about whether we're right or wrong, when we come to one of these words that ends in us, what do we do? Oh, oh, oh, oh, and you think, okay, um, Octopi. Yeah, yeah, Octopi, that must be it. And then someone comes along and says, no, no, no, the proper plural of octopuses, octopides in the Greek. And then they've won up to you on your knowledge of classical languages. And that keeps us using these crusty old rules that don't really have a place in English

and we're consciously brought about, consciously put in there to elevate the language. And then what I was curious about is the PS and psychology or MN and Nimonic were those always spelled that way or were those added later to fancify things? Words like psychology and Nimonic were brought in as is much later. So those are people borrowing them directly from Greek translated into Latin and putting them into English. But some of them that we spell with these classical spellings in the beginning were spelled normally. So Flem and diarrhea. These were things we had and talked about in English. So Flem was F-L-E-M-E and Diario is D-I-A-R-I-A, but later during the sprucing up phase of the language, we made the connection back to their fancy roots, you know, elevating Flem in Diaria, putting the G in there and putting all these

ours in there and making it really confusing to spell. Is this sprucing up where the different English and American spellings of words like color and labor come from? Is that, or is that something completely different? Well, it seems like it would be, but it's more the British trying to separate themselves from the Americans. So for a long time, the O-R-U-R-O-U-R thing was back and forth with everybody. It wasn't standardized here, it wasn't standardized there, but then Webster's Dictionary came about and he wanted to simplify spelling and make it more American, more natural. So get rid of some of these unnecessary letters.

And his first idea on this did not work. His original dictionary idea had, you know, believe spelled B-E-E-E-V and soup spelled S-O-O-P, and things we do not do. We did not take those changes. Nobody even tried, it was too hilarious.. You see the word spelled that way. But a few of those things did work. Like color is going to be OR. And in England, they were still back and forth on all these things. But once it was determined, oh, this is the American way, they said, and we're not doing it the American way.

Once you've spotted the difference, it's a choice to make yourself distinct. Some of my favorite examples from your book is words, you know, phrases that behave strangely not because of these larger, huge larger influences like the printing processor dictionaries, but just because they went on their own kind of whimsical journey, for example, the story of the phrase to egg someone on, it really does show this sort of like timing is kind of everything.

And like, I guess you might say, can you describe what the phrase egg someone on is about? Well, that's egg someone on is a very old phrase, and we would have in English, an old English, it was more like edge. That would be the pronunciation, and that's what the word means to eggsamanan is to edge them on, sort of in the sense of you got the edge of a sword, making them go forward. Go on, go on, I'm edging you on. But we also were mixing in the very early days of English. We're talking, you know,

800s, 900s. We had Viking invasions happening in the north of England. And the Vikings had the similar language also from a similar Germanic route. So they had this edge word too, but they said egg. That was how they pronounced it. The Vikings had that hard g sound and a lot of the English words that have that hard g sound like give we got from them. And we adopted their way of saying egg on for edge on. And at the time we said egg differently. So egg was more like eye and then later we adopted the Norse or Viking way of saying that word too, which they had changed into egg. But again, with their hard G, the very strong hard G, they have a lot of influence that way. So our edge became egg and egg on and then our eye became egg and they just happened to sound exactly the same now even though they started as different words.

You know, with all this insanity, it's easy enough to make the case that English is kind of the worst, you know, but you could also make the case that English is the best. Like, do all these irregularities and weird rabbit holes make English, like, kind of like the most fun in the end. Well, I think English has a unique position and it's definitely a world language. So many people use it that aren't native speakers and it has low startup costs. This is how it's been described to me by people who don't speak it as a native language, who learn it later. I think English, you can get up and going pretty fast.

Unlike other languages where you have to learn a lot of word endings or various conjugations, English, you got words and you put them together and you could start going with it. But then it just keeps opening new challenges for you, the deeper you get into it. And there are layers and layers and layers to discover as you go. So it's very impressive how people learn it so well and can get from layer to layer. And we should be more impressed about that. That's a wonderful

thing about the language. It makes it fun and we should respect it more. It should praise people more for learning English. Eric, thank you so much for talking with us. This was so great. Thank you. Well, it's great to be back. [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background different wrinkles in English. There's so much more in the book, so go definitely check it out. It's available wherever books are sold. We'll also have a link on our website. It's 9i9pi.org. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Joe Rosenberg, mixed in tech production by Dara Hirsch, music by a director of sound, Swan Rihau.

Delaney Hall is the executive producer Kurt Colstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Le, Lashemadon, Chris Baroube, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are part of a Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family. Now head to quartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful. Uptown. Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 9-9-PI-ORG. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu Tudu