  I've been working on another column for the bilingual newspaper, but this is much too long and probably not entertaining enough for publication. Still,on the off chance that one of my blog readers would enjoy the results of my time with the urlLink Online Etymological Dictionary and a urlLink History of English website, I will publish them here. And one explanatory note: all pronunciation is written as if it were Spanish. Why English Is Hard As a teacher of English, I’ve heard many complaints about English spelling over the years. Why is English so hard to read? Why don’t letters sound the same?
Native speakers often have similar complaints. American teachers struggle to teach young children the rules of spelling and pronunciation. One popular approach is to teach phonics - that is, how the sounds of letters combine to form words. Unfortunately, less than 50% of English obey those sound-spelling rules! In fact, I remember a joke I learned as a kid: Do you know that in English, you can spell "fish" as "ghoti"? Sure, because gh="f" in the word "rough," o="i" in the word "women," and ti="sh" in the word "nation.
" I laughed at the cleverness of the joke, but it makes my students cry. Sadly, I have no tricks to make English spelling any easier to learn. However, I can try to answer the question of why it’s so hard. In a nutshell: Pronunciation has changed over time, while spelling has remained the same. And pronunciation has changed for two reasons: 1) Gradual historical change 2) Borrowing of words from other languages. The English language was born about 500 A.D. when some German speakers moved from the European continent to the British Isles.
Their particular dialect of German became what we now call Old English. Old English is a completely foreign language to modern speakers - both the vocabulary and pronunciation of English have changed drastically in the past 1500 years. A little bit of that original Germanic vocabulary has survived in English, and one of the spelling quirks it has brought with it is the combination "gh," which is usually silent, but occasionally sounded as “f” at the end of a word. Consider: right daughter laugh rough A long time ago, the "gh" in those words was pronounced like the Spanish "j" ( a little stronger than the English "h.") In some words, that sound disappeared completely, as in "right" and "daughter. " In other words, the sound changed to "f," as in "laugh and "rough. " In Modern German, all those words have retained the pronunciation "j:" right = richtig daughter=Tochter laugh=lachen rough=roh or rauh Also, the original vowel sounds of English were the same as Spanish vowels.
However, in the 1400s, all the "long" vowels of English changed their place of articulation. This linguistic event is called The Great Vowel Shift. Here are some examples of the change in pronunciation of modern words. Before The Great Vowel Shift: "meet" sounded like "met" "my" sounded like "mi" "boot" sounded like "bout" "house" sounded like "jus" "name" sounded like "nam" This change was gradual and inconsistent and incomplete, accounting for different accents among English speakers today, and different pronunciations of a single spelling. For example, the spelling "ea" once had the sound "ae" (which is the vowel sound in "cat" or "hand. ") Then it changed to "e" and later to "i.
" We can see that not all words made the change by comparing these: bread = "bred" break = "breik" speak = "spik" So, historical change along with conservative spelling is the large part of the answer to that question, why is English so hard? But another source of difficulty comes from words borrowed from other languages. English has borrowed close to 90% of its vocabulary and consequently has one of the largest vocabularies of any language in the world. The borrowing started very early in its history when the conquering Germanic tribes took words from the native Celtic languages. Soon, Scandinavians invaded England and left many Scandinavian words in the vocabulary. English was further enriched by Latin when the Christian religion took hold in the British Isles in the 700s.
Another large influx of Latin-based vocabulary came when the French conquered England after the war of 1066. Greek words came into the vocabulary during the Renaissance, and later, in the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, Greek and Latin roots became the source of neologisms to describe new inventions. Those are some of the major periods of borrowing, but English has borrowed from every language it’s been in contact with, keeping souvenirs from Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Polynesian, Fulani, Yiddish, Persian, Turkish, etc. If the original word was written in the Roman alphabet, we generally borrowed its spelling and either changed or imitated the original sound. Here’s where the spelling inconsistencies come up: For example, we pronounce the word “fiancé” as the French do, rather than as a rhyme for “alliance.” And the Greek “hyperbole” (hai per bo li) doesn’t sound like a football game (get it, Rose Bowl, Hyper Bowl. .
. ) And the Australian “koala” doesn’t sound like a soft drink of any kind. As irritating as all of these irregularities are for the learner of English, they do offer something nice – they offer stories. Our words remain attached to their origins just enough that we can get a glimpse of other places and times. 
