If you haven’t yet read Part 1, please do so.
The English long vowel sounds went through some major changes. This happened gradually, over a period of about 400 years starting in the 14th century. The word time was once pronounced just like team is today, while what is now team used to be pronounced similarly to today’s tame. This process is known as the Great Vowel Shift. While the sounds shifted, the spellings of words generally didn’t, and that’s why the pronunciation of English vowels can confuse learners, even in words that are spelt in a consistent way. It also explains why, when I try and spell words to non-native speakers, they are often confused by the letters A, E and I. To complicate matters further, some words escaped the vowel shift, or only shifted partially, and that’s why road and broad don’t rhyme, and neither do bear and hear.
English spelling wasn’t standardised until the 18th century, which is relatively recent. If I’d given my students those spelling tests (see Part 1) 300 years ago, they all would have got 100%; the idea of “right” and “wrong” spelling didn’t exist then. William Shakespeare famously wrote his name in about a dozen different ways, which included just about anything you could think of except, apparently, Shakespeare itself! When spellings were eventually set in stone, they weren’t done so in any logical way. Now we might decide to put cheese in the freezer, but we could just as easily be putting cheeze in the freeser. That cheese got an S while freeze got a Z was essentially random.
There have been attempts to modify and simplify English spelling (there were several in the early 20th century) but with one notable exception, none of them have worked. English spelling has remained an untamed mess. There are reasons for this. What sort of changes would you bring in? A small one (removing silent k, say) or a transition to an entirely phonetic language, wër yoo end up wiθ sumθing laik ðis? How would people agree, on both sides of the Atlantic and everywhere else in the world where English is spoken? If New Spelling became a reality, how would you search documents or web pages that might be written in Old or New Spelling? What would happen to QWERTY keyboards? How would you deal with words that have multiple pronunciations, like vase, which I pronounce /vɑːz/ but others pronounce /veɪs/ or /veɪz/? Here you can hear all three common pronunciations of vase. All of these factors make any systematic spelling changes almost impossible to achieve. Other languages have undergone spelling reform, as Romanian did on a fairly minor scale in the early 1990s, but none of them faced the challenges that English would. The one reform that did succeed, by the way, was lexicographer Noah Webster’s changes in American English: colour became color, centre became center, and so on. But in other parts of the English-speaking world, the old spellings stayed the same.
That’s it for Part 2, but be sure to check out Part 3, where I talk about some of the specific features of English spelling that make it so confusing.