The Word Snoop Read online

  So for the letter for the sound C, for instance, you could draw a very simple picture, say, of a Cat. Or a Computer. Or a Cake. Or a Coconut.

  Or a . . . actually, I think I’ll leave it to you!

  Shorthand

  Shorthand? What’s that?

  I can tell you one thing, you don’t need a short hand to write it, but it sure takes a short time!

  Have a look at this:

  You might think this is just a lot of crazy squiggles that mean nothing at all. But actually it’s not. Shorthand is not really an alphabet, but a special way of writing with symbols so that you can put down on paper very, very quickly what people are saying out loud. You can write with shorthand far more quickly than if you tried to write something down the ordinary way.

  There are thousands of different shorthand systems, going right back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. The most famous is probably one called Pitman, invented by Englishman Sir Isaac Pitman in 1837. Usually journalists or court reporters use shorthand, so we can have a record of what people said. Nowadays there are computers with special keyboards so that you can type shorthand, which is even faster than writing it.

  But shorthand has also been used as a way of writing secrets. Way back in the sixteenth century, Englishman Timothy Bright published a guide to his own shorthand, called An Arte of Shorte, Swifte and Secrete Writing by Character. (Sounds good for us Word Snoops, doesn’t it?) And one of the most remarkable diary-keepers in all history, Englishman Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peeps), wrote 3,000 pages of his diary in such a particular shorthand that when he died no one could understand it. It took a lot of people over a hundred years to finally “translate” it back into English.

  So if you knew shorthand, you could keep your own diary and write all sorts of secret messages with it. Like the squiggles on page 18—if you don’t know shorthand, it could mean anything. I’ll give you a hint, though. The cat sat on . . . Okay, okay, you guessed it!

  Psst, Word Snoops! Remember how I mentioned a secret message at the start of this book? Well, here’s the first part. But you’ll have to crack the special code if you want to know what I’m saying. (Hint: Think about the alphabet, backward and forward . . .)

  MLD GSZG BLF SZEV

  Dear Snoops,

  Have you ever noticed how strange English is?

  For one thing, it has a lot of strange rules,

  especially for spelling. But what’s worse, it has

  even more strange exceptions. An exception is

  something that breaks the rule. English has

  LOTS of very odd exceptions.

  But why? That’s exactly what I wondered,

  and I can tell you it took some pretty extreme

  snooping to find out.

  Are you ready? You need to be sitting down

  in a nice, quiet, comfortable spot

  for this particular story . . .

  Your comrade in espionage,

  The Word Snoop

  2.

  Why is English so strange?

  Silent Letters

  Shhh! It’s time to talk about silent letters.

  You know those pesky silent letters. They’re the ones that creep sneakily into words at the beginning, middle, or end when you’re not expecting them. Like the k in knife, the gh in night, or the b in comb. (Aaagh! What are you doing there, silent letters! You frightened me!)

  Have a look at this sentence:The handsome ghost wriggled through

  the castle in half an hour.

  Can you count how many silent letters there are? Eight? Or perhaps even more? Count them up for yourself. Come on, don’t be silent . . .

  English is not the only language with silent letters, but it has more than most. In fact, about 60 percent of words in English have a silent letter in them. This can be really hard when you’re learning to spell, as you’ve probably realized already.

  So why are those silent letters there? Well, it’s all because of the mixed-up history of the English language. Remember how English began in about the fifth century AD when people from Germany settled in Celtic-speaking England? And then those Latin-speaking Christian monks turned up, followed in the ninth century by Norse-speaking Vikings? And then finally William the Conqueror appeared in the eleventh century with his French-speaking friends and conquered them all? (Why couldn’t they all just stay quietly at home curled up sensibly by the fireside?)

  Goodness. Celtic, German, Latin, Norse, and now French speakers, each with their own language, alphabet, and system of spelling—it’s a mystery how anybody understood each other! And actually, because William the Conqueror spoke French, for a while there French even became the official language of England. This is where quite a few of our silent letters crept in, from French words, where the h was not pronounced. For example, the silent h in hour comes from the French heure (pronounced, um, “er”). I bet you can think of a few others like that. (Can’t you? Honestly?)

  Funnily enough, around this time people started putting letters into English words that weren’t even French in the first place, to make them look more French. That’s how the u was added to the original Latin word color—and it’s still spelled “colour” like this in many English-speaking countries. (Though not in the U.S.!) Then other people thought it would be good if English looked more like Latin, so a b, for example, was dumped back into the word doubt, even though it had been taken out because no one pronounced it that way anymore. And have you ever wondered about words like psalm and rhubarb? (Well, I have.) They came from ancient Greek words, which had ancient Greek letters, psi and rho. Oh, why couldn’t they just leave poor old English alone!

  So that’s an explanation for some of our silent letters. Another important thing to know is that quite a few of today’s silent letters have not always been so quiet. The word knight, for example, used to be pronounced in English with the k and the gh sounded out (ke-nee-g-hht), as were many of the silent e’s and l’s. And the silent w in words like wreck or write was originally there to show a funny sort of Old English r sound that was different from the ordinary r. But over time the way people spoke English changed, even though the spelling didn’t.

  And don’t forget The Great Vowel Shift . . .

  The what?

  This strange happening started during the fifteenth century. What it meant was that gradually people began to change the way they said their vowels (a, e, i, o, u)—the sounds shifted to a different part of their mouth. Up until The Great Vowel Shift, a word like met was pronounced more like our word mate,and goat was pronounced more like goot. (Try saying them out loud and you’ll see what I mean about your mouth.) Anyway, with these changes of pronunciation going on all over the place, letters in words appeared and disappeared as people wrote them down differently, and it all got even more confusing.

  All right, you say, but this was hundreds of years ago. Why do we still use spellings based on how people used to speak?

  Well, around the time of The Great Vowel Shift something truly extraordinary happened.

  Are you ready . . . ?

  The Invention of Printing

  What happened was something that truly CHANGED THE WORLD. It was a technological invention from Germany, which was just as amazing as the invention of the television or computers or the Internet.

  This invention was—wait for it—the printing press! Now, while types of fixed printing, called block printing or stamping, had already been used in China for centuries, the mechanized printing press, with letters that could be moved around, was a brand-new invention that changed everything. Why? Well, believe it or not, until then all books in Europe had to be copied out by hand—usually by monks. It took ages just to make a single book, so there weren’t many books around. People traveled for miles, even to different countries, just to read a book that was kept in a particular library.

  But when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, it meant that machines could print onto paper over and over again, and then the paper could be bou
nd into books. By the end of the fifteenth century, there were thousands of books in print all over Europe. (Those lucky monks could heave a big sigh, put their pens down, and have a nice bath instead!)

  In England, a printing press was set up in 1476 by a man called William Caxton. Although people spoke and spelled English differently all over the country, Caxton decided to print books in the type of English that people used in the biggest city—London. This is the kind of English that we now call Modern English, and it’s basically what we speak and write—and spell—today.

  Printing was very important for spelling, because the decision of how to spell words was left largely to the people running the printing press (just as before it had been left largely to the monks who copied the books out). The problem was that quite a lot of the printers were from Europe, and English was not their first language. So, even if they were good spellers, it was easy for them to make mistakes. ( Just imagine us Word Snoops trying to decide how to spell something in Spanish, por ejemplo. I mean, for example!) This is thought to be the reason for the silent letter in the word ghost, which was originally spelled without an h. Printers from Holland put the h in, because that’s how they spelled it in their language.

  But that was just one complication. Printers also affected spelling because they wanted printed pages to look nice and neat, with all the lines ending at the same place. (This is called justifying—you might have seen this option on the computer.) In order to make printed lines longer or shorter, sometimes printers would decide to add an extra letter (an e, for example), or leave one off. This happened especially with what you might call unnecessary letters—such as the k, which used to be put at the ends of words like music(musick) and logic(logick).

  Now, once something’s printed out, it can be hard to change. This was especially true back in the days when printing began, as one of the most popular books in print was the Bible. The printers felt very nervous about changing anything in the Bible, even if it didn’t look quite right.

  Even more importantly, there was still no such thing as a standard dictionary with agreed “correct” spellings that the printers could look up to check a word as we would today. And let’s face it, in the old days they didn’t have quite the same idea of correct spelling as we do, anyway. The poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the famous Canterbury Tales in the fourteenth century, even seemed to have spelled a similar word two different ways in one sentence! See if you can spot it.

  Nowher so besy a man as he . . . And yet

  he semed bisier than he was.

  But the arrival of printing meant that people became more interested in the idea of standard spelling and how a word should be written. They realized it would make life much easier for everyone if the spelling of a word was always the same.

  This led to the beginnings of English dictionaries. The most famous and fascinating of the early English dictionaries was that of Dr. Samuel Johnson, published in 1755. Dr. Johnson loved the English language so much that he wanted to make sure its wonderful words would be looked after properly. He read thousands and thousands of books, letters, poems, and plays—and more—to find what he thought was the best spelling and meaning for a word.

  So, next time you read a sentence, you’ll realize you’re seeing something very special. It may be that the word is spelled how it was pronounced hundreds of years ago, or according to a fashion, or just by mistake or confusion, or because somebody liked it like that. But all of those amazing spellings have been preserved, even frozen in the language, like fossils trapped in amber . . .

  American Spelling

  By the time Dr. Johnson was writing his dictionary, people from Britain had begun to roam around the world in ships and make settlements in lots of different countries. This was the beginning of something known as the British Empire. And just as William the Conqueror brought the French language with him to England when he conquered it, so these English people brought along English to all the different places they went. They spoke it, taught it, and published newspapers and books in it.

  That’s why English is spoken in so many different parts of the world—North America, Australia, Africa, and India, just to name a few. And in each place, naturally enough, a different kind of English developed, not just in accents or the way people pronounce words, but also in ways of making sentences and types of words—and yes, spelling.

  Now, as you already know, not everybody likes English spelling, and there have been many calls to fix it up and get rid of things like silent letters. Probably the most successful act of spelling reform took place in the United States in the eighteenth century after the American Revolution, when America became independent from Britain. During this time, a man by the name of Noah Webster (remember him from Chapter 1?) decided to write a dictionary of American English. He saw it as a big chance for a new country to improve all that pesky British spelling. Webster was particularly eager to get rid of what he described as “silent letters; as a in bread. Thus bread, head, give, breast, built, meant, realm, friend, would be spelled, bred, hed, giv, brest, bilt, ment, relm, frend. Would this alteration produce any inconvenience, any embarrassment or expense? By no means.”

  Well, he didn’t get everything he wanted (by no means!), but he did succeed in removing some silent letters from American spelling, like the u from colour (I mean, color), and the gue ending from words like dialogue (I mean, dialog). But American English still has plenty of silent letters left behind that nobody seems able to chase away.

  Over the centuries, thousands of dedicated, clever, and passionate people throughout the English-speaking world have argued sensibly and intelligently for spelling reform but, apart from Noah Webster, nobody’s had much success. Although with e-mails and texting you can see there are some differences creeping in . . .

  But I don’t know, maybe we’re all secretly fond of these silent letters. They’re a bit like stray cats that wander into the house. After a while you just get used to seeing them there, and you might miss them if they went away. They remind you of all the people who have been speaking English for hundreds and hundreds of years before you.

  Spelling Test

  Geoffrey Chaucer was a wonderful, funny, imaginative poet who lived in England in the fourteenth century. Here’s a quote from one of his poems. If you were his teacher marking it today, how many spelling mistakes would you spot? Try not to be too hard on him—remember there was no such thing as a dictionary then, let alone spellcheck . . .

  But every thyng which schyneth as the gold,

  Nis nat gold, as that I have herd it told

  And what about this one?

  And gladly wolde he lerne

  and gladly teche.

  Oh well, at least he got and right!

  Plurals

  It’s not just spelling that makes English strange, though. What about plurals?

  Plural means more than one. (I know, I know, you knew that already!) In English, when you want to make a word plural you just add an s. So a cat becomes cats, sausage becomes sausages, and—

  But wait a minute. What about mouse? You can’t say two mouses. And what about sheep? There’s no such thing as many sheeps. Or three womans—and what about one knife and two knives? And one hero and two heroes. What’s that all about?

  You’re right. It’s not always just an s. (There they go again, those dastardly exceptions . . .)

  The Anglo-Saxons (remember them?), who began the English language, had quite a few ways of making a plural. For some words they added es, but for others they added an r or an en, or sometimes both. This is why today we still say child and children, and ox and oxen. They also had plurals that changed the sound inside the word instead of at the end, like man and men, foot and feet, tooth and teeth. Then there were words in Anglo-Saxon that didn’t change at all in the plural, like sheep and fish. And as for things like leaf and leaves? Well, in Anglo-Saxon, an f at the end of a word sounded like v anyway, and over time somehow the v made its way into the plural spelling. />
  Now, I’m sure you haven’t forgotten William-the-Conqueror-who-came-to-England-from- France-and-conquered-it-very-quickly. (Um, have you?) Anyway, as I was telling you, William and all his friends and relatives (there were lots of them) spoke French, and in French usually they just added an s to make a plural. This fine idea became popular in English as well, and is now the most common way to do it.

  So, there are the Anglo-Saxon plurals and the French plurals, but there’s yet another type of plural in English that you may have noticed—the Latin and Greek plurals. During the Renaissance (from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century), educated people felt that the ancient languages of Latin and Greek were really the best of all. So they started to throw Latin and Greek words into English—words like crisis or radius. But then, what if they wanted to mention more than one crisis or radius? Crisis es and radiuses sounds terrible (especially if you happen to have a lisp). So instead they kept the Latin and Greek ways of making plurals for those sorts of words—crises and radii.

  That explains at least where some of these plurals come from. But, like the funny spellings, it doesn’t explain why we don’t just change it all to something easier. I mean, there are languages like Japanese and Chinese, spoken by millions and millions of people, that don’t even have plurals and it doesn’t bother anyone.