I have a question for you linguists and philos and biblios: why are tough and enough not pronounced like cough, and why are slouch and couch not pronounced like touch?

I would love to know it as well, I keep forgetting to ask this.

Now that I’m here, how come the “e” at the end of a word changes it’s sound sometimes.

Example:

Dove (Dough’ve) ,vs Dove (Duv)
Rule (R-uu-le) ,vs Dove (Duv)

I don’t know the story behind those words in particular…

In general spelling in the English language is a travesty of phonetic inconsistency because it wasn’t established by English speakers. Prior to the printed word the concept of universal spelling didn’t exist. Shakespeare spelled his name five different ways and even long after the arrival of the printing press Mark Twain declared,

“I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.”

The idea of universal spelling arrived with the revolution of printing technology. The thing is printing was being developed in non-English speaking countries like Germany and Belgium. This means Germans and Belgians that didn’t really know much about English spelling were trying to sort out how to write the English texts they were printing. For the most part they used the phonetic rules of their own language to transcribe English words.

The result was that some words became accepted with a German phonetic spelling while others, like “ghost”, follow the Dutch spelling. The result is an uncontrolled mishmash of unrelated phonetic systems and the only language with spelling so counter intuitive we have spelling competitions.

Some English words are actually foreign words and maintain their foreign spelling. Think “rendevous” and “gnocchi”.

Anyone who has studied English knows the one inflexible carinal unchanging principle that governs the language like an iron-clad dictator.

The exceptions to the rule(s). Every rule in the English language always has several exceptions.

It’s sort of the Uncertainty Principle of English.

The Great Vowel Shift can help explain why vowels are so challenging for learners of English.

@LeopardGecko The “e” at the end of dove, both in the bird or swimming context, is still an “e” – so it has nothing to do with the pronunication. Like tear – when it’s a verb meaning to cut, it has a short “e” sound, and when it means the water from your eyes when you cry, it has a long “e” sound.

If there is a rule for this, I’d like to know as well.

Edit: @fundevogel – loved your reply!

Edit: @the100thmonkey I had forgotten about that – thanks for the link. What’s your nickname about btw?

@Zen_Again Actually “dove”, the action, does follow a spelling rule. The “e” at and end of a word preceded by a vowel and then a consonant will make the pronunciation of the vowel long.

The other “dove” breaks the rule.

Edit: thank you!

@fundevogel I am aware of the “magic e” and it’s various names which make the vowel sound long. I am looking for rules why dove has two pronunications, just like my question.

@Zen_Again The rules of English spelling (and grammar for that matter) are just an attempt to retroactively organize and justify what evolved on its own.

Ultimately all attempts to make English adhere to any logical system are doomed to fail :)

@Zen_Again: It’s about Scepticism. I came across it in The Quark and the Jaguar, and thought it apposite, given the town I was living in at the time, whose name translates into something like Broken Tail in English.

Thanks gents.

English is a composite language. Based on Celtic/Germanic roots, overlayed by Norman French and “borrowings” of words from other languages along the way. For example, British dialect is intrespersed with Hindu/Urdu terms that escaped incorporation into American dialect since the US broke from the Empire in the late 18th century. Likewise some Native American and Filipino terms do not appear in British English.

Because of this mixing of word origins, there are often more exceptions to a rule than adherants to it. Another issue is that “borrowed” words are often anglicized in pronunciation, but left in their original pronunciation depending on the speakers intent.

This all contributes to the fact that English is one of the most difficult languages for a non-native speaker to learn. I often run into this when translating technical manuals from “schoolbook” English to a form usable to native English speakers.

@fundevogel – Thank you, that is what I was asking. How come some words are allowed to break this rule? And why does an E at the end change the pronunciation of the vowel itself?

@LeopardGecko It’s like I said in my previous post. The rules didn’t establish how words were spelled. They tried to give a reason for why words were already being spelled a certain way. Obviously since there hadn’t been any principle guiding their spelling no single rule could explain how English words were spelled. So they made up rules that covered the spelling of the most words and then made up more rules to explain why the other words didn’t follow the rules. It’s a quixotic enterprise.

For my part I’d like a rule justifying why “one” is pronounced as if there was an invisible W at the front. I’d settle for another example of invisible W’s in the English language.

@fundevogel – Alright, fair enough. Are there any explanations for silent letters such as “knife”, instead of “nife” ? .

Also to anybody, why in different languages are there masculine and feminine forms of words?

Another point is that English spelling was not standardized until the mid 19th century. This standardization was along different lines on either side of the Atlantic. (“kerb” vs. “curb”, “centre” vs. “center”, etc.)

@LeopardGecko Apparently “knife” was originally the German word “knif” so if you wanted a good explanation you would have to look to German spelling systems.

Actually, some spelling conventions were established before the Great Vowel Shift. So the word “five” used to be pronounce “feev-uh”, and accurately represented its pronunciation at the time of Chaucer. The same with “mood”, which was pronounced “mode”, and food, which was “fode”. The terminal “e” was pronounced as a schwa, as it still is in French.

The “genderification” of nouns is one feature of the romance/germanic languages that never made it into English, other than some oddities like referring to ships as “she”.

Maybe the question to ask is what causes such regularity in the spelling of other languages. Consider, for example, irregular verbs. All languages, at least all the ones that I have ever heard of, have irregular verbs, and they tend to be the ones that are most common. This makes sense. When languages first start, there will be differences in how verbs are conjugated. Eventually one method gains general acceptance and is applied to most new verbs. So the question I have is, why does the same thing not happen with spelling?

Since English derived from so many antecedents – Celtic languages, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Norse and the romance languages – word spellings and pronunciations have evolved differently over time.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land Old English nouns were declined not only for the nominative, the dative, the genitive and the instrumental, but also for three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter.

@pdworkin Who are you, Noam Chomsky, too?

I know stuff. It that such a crime?

this is relevant.
and this
I love saving up stumbleupon sites and being able to use them somewhere.

Lol at the Chomsky reference – I actually took a linguistics course about 25 years ago and had him as a guest speaker. Brilliant! Hates Israel but Brilliant. Nice job guys @jan pd and sarcasm

Lurve you guys!

tough is from Old English tōh, enough is from Old English ġenōh.
cough is from Middle English couhe, cowȝe, couȝe.

couch is borrowed from French couche in the 13th century, and touch is borrowed from Old French tochier.

The modern spellings are the same, but the pronunciations remain different.

@fundevogel The printing press was imported to English by William Caxton in 1476. English spelling was developed in England.

@morphail – My father related the information regarding the foreign printing as he read a book on the subject. It was either The Mother Tongue or Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue I can’t remember which. Both are on my own reading list.

I thought the use of multiple foreign phonetic systems was the best explanation I’d ever heard for inconsistent spelling and the word “ghost” was an explicit example given of employing Dutch phoentic systems that are wholly inconsistent with typical English systems.

@fundevogel The Mother Tongue is full of errors. John McWhorter, on the other hand, knows what he’s talking about.

You’re right about multiple influences on English spelling. The spelling of “ghost” was influenced by the Flemish “gheest”. We adopted French ways of spelling, for instance we respelled “cwen” as “queen” and “gylt” as “guilt”. Some words were respelled to reflect their etymology, for instance “det” was changed to “debt”. But I don’t think it’s true that English spelling was established by non-English speakers.

Oh, I’ve heard good things about him. Any book recommendation in particular? I’ve got The Power of Babel waiting for me to pick it up at the library.

Thanks for the info :)