6 year-old: Sound writing Alphabetic Principle  1 letter = 1 phoneme e.g., in 2 letters, 2 phonemes kin 3 letters, 3 phonemes skin 4 letters, 4 phonemes

 Well instituted in some languages e.g., Dutch, Spanish, Indonesian

 Often violated in English: tough

Spelling vs. pronunciation

 Silent letters: knife, island, doubt, lamb, though, corps

 Same letter for different sounds: give, gist, enough; tough, bough, cough, dough, douche

 Different letters for the same sound: see, sea, scene, seize, receive, amoeba, Aesop, machine

 Homographs: tear (cry) – tear (pull); read – read

 George Bernard Shaw: ghoti

Reasons for sound-symbol mismatches 1

 Not enough letters - 26 letters for 40 phonemes

 Changes in pronunciation - /k/ became silent before /n/: knot - Sound spelled gh was lost completely: through, night, knight

 Loanwords spelled as in the donor language pterodactyl, knish, beauty, doubt

Reasons for sound-symbol mismatches 2

 Different historical spellings: 1. Pre-1066 Anglo-Saxon deed, seen 2. Norman French thief (earlier: theef) queen (earlier: cween) 3. Dutch influence via William Caxton ghost, ghastly 4. Renaissance attempts to “restore original spelling” salmon (earlier: samon); debt, doubt Spelling pronunciation

 Nicknames preserving older pronunciation: [t] [θ] Art Arthur Kate Catherine Betty Elizabeth

 Reinserting [h] in French loanwords: - No [h] in very common words (hour, honest) - [h] now in hospital (from French [opital]), hotel, habit, heretic, etc. - [h] now appearing in herb Virtues of English spelling  Same spelling everywhere - standardization - mutual intelligibility despite dialectal diversity

 Spelling gives clues to meaning - etymological: physics, philosophy - morphological: resign – resignation

 Differential spelling of homophones - knight – night - so – sow - to – two – too - there – their – they’re

Sounds the same Sample exam questions

 Give a definition and an example for the term spelling pronunciation.

 Mark the words in which the sound [s] actually occurs:

a. Asia b. box c. walls d. (Marine) corps e. corpse

 Write an essay discussing violations of the Alphabetic Principle in English.