On Fourth and So Forth, Or The Oddest English Spellings (Part 7)
Anatoly looks at the oddest English spellings.
In Jeopardy, Or, The Oddest English Spellings
(Part 6)
Anatoly Liberman’s weekly column. The Oddest English Spellings Part Six.
The Sole of the Nation.
Or, The Oddest English Spellings (Part 5)
Oddest English Spellings, Part 5.
The Tongue Between the Teeth,
Or, The Oddest English Spellings (Part 4)
By Anatoly Liberman It is easy to get used to certain conventions. No characters exist for the initial consonants of the English words shin, chin, and thin, and at an early age we learn that two letters are needed to render them in spelling. In Part 3 of the series “The Oddest English Spellings,” I compared shelf, […]
The Oddest English Spellings (Part 3)
by Anatoly Liberman If we disregard the use of runes, we may say that literacy came to Europe with Christianity. Two exceptions are Greece and Italy. England, like its neighbors, adopted the Roman script, but the sounds of the Germanic languages (and English belongs to the Germanic group of the Indo-European family) were in many […]
The Oddest English Spellings,
Or, A Lasting Tribute to Diversity, Part 2
by Anatoly Liberman The terms King’s English ~ Queen’s English are familiar to many. They presuppose that the monarch speaks in a way to be admired and emulated. Language obeys the laws of biology (to the extent that it depends on the production of sounds) and of society (since it is a means of communication) […]
The Oddest English Spellings,
Or, the Unhealing Wounds of Tradition (Part 1)
by Anatoly Liberman Once out of school, we stop noticing the vagaries of English spelling and resign ourselves to the fact that rite, right, Wright (or wright in playwright), and write are homophones without being homographs. In most cases such words sounded different in the past, then changed their pronunciation, but retained their spelling. Such […]
Children’s games and some problematic English spellings
Several years ago, I wrote a series of posts titled “The Oddest English Spellings.” Later, The English Spelling Society began to prepare a new version of the Reform, and I let a team of specialists deal with such problems. Yet an email from one of our regular correspondents suggested to me that perhaps one more […]
Our habitat: booth
This post has been written in response to a query from our correspondent. An answer would have taken up the entire space of my next “gleanings,” and I decided not to wait a whole month.
Monthly gleanings for December 2014, Part 2
Although I am still in 2014, as the title of this post indicates, in the early January one succumbs to the desire to say something memorable that will set the tone to the rest of the year. So I would like to remind everybody that in 1915 James Murray, the first and greatest editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) or New English Dictionary (NED), died.
Monthly etymology gleanings for June 2012, part 2
By Anatoly Liberman
Spelling. I am grateful for the generous comments on my post in the heartbreak series “The Oddest English Spellings.” Several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Masha Bell at a congress in Coventry, and around that time I corresponded with Valerie Yule. A positive comment from Peter Demaere (Canada) reinforced my message. The situation is as odd as English spelling. Spelling reform had famous supporters from the start. Great linguists, including Walter W. Skeat and Otto Jespersen, and outstanding authors and public figures agreed that we should no longer spell the way we do.
Kneading bread for the needy
By Anatoly Liberman
In those rare cases in which people ask my advice about good writing, I tell them not to begin (to not begin?) their works with epigraphs from Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde, for the rest will look like an insipid anticlimax, and, disdainful of ground-to-dust buzzwords and familiar quotations, I also suggest that people avoid (naturally, like the plague) such titles as “A Tale of Two Friendships/ Losses/ Wars,” etc. and resist the temptation to
Monthly Gleanings: January 2007
Anatoly’s monthly gleanings.