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Friday, June 01, 2018

The Silliness of Spelling Bees

The 91st Scripps National Spelling Bee concluded yesterday, when a 14-year-old boy from Texas named Karthik Nemmani correctly spelled the word koinonia.  That's a Greek word, meaning a body of religious believers. The girl who took second place misspelled the word bewusstseinlage, German for a feeling devoid of sensory components.

So if these are Greek and German words, why is this a billed as a test of English spelling?

English adopts words from other languages to describe new things that exist in another culture or religion or scientific discipline. Other languages do the same thing, which is why German and French newspapers are littered with tech-related English terms.

English spelling is not hard because we have so many of these foreign loanwords: most of them come from languages with phonetic spelling (like bewusstseinlage), or are phonetic transliterations (like koinonia or samurai). They are spelled the way they are pronounced, using the spelling and transliteration conventions of those languages.

On the other hand, spelling of native English words is hard because pronunciations have changed over the centuries (with remarkably predictable progression), but we have retained older spellings. English spelling is not arbitrary and chaotic -- there are logical historical and linguistic reasons for most of our "crazy" spellings.

For example, the word right used to be pronounced somewhat like the first syllable of the German word richtig (the ch is a voiceless velar fricative). Over time English either dropped the velar fricative (as in right and through) or replaced it with another sound (such as the f in laugh). The vowel shifted from a "long e" sound to a "long i" sound in the Great Vowel Shift.

English is a Germanic language, so it has common roots with German. But English changed drastically after the Norman invasion. For centuries Latin was the language of the Church and historians, and French was the language of the English court. Thus, thousands of Latin and French words flowed into the common tongue, making it a Germanic/Latinate amalgam. That's why the easiest way to improve your English spelling is to learn some German, French and Latin.

The spelling bee is really a contest of general linguistic knowledge, not English orthography. Perhaps that's why the majority of winners are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. Or are native-born Americans just getting dumber, fatter and lazier?

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