Introduction

In the week since I published my last little mumbling about why Latin scholars today should use the macron, see here, I’ve had more conversations than normal with those of you who’ve been reading this about ways we can improve communication and education in and for English. Ours is a very complicated language, one that has effectively assimilated aspects from other languages, grafting them onto its strong oaken Germanic trunk, and created new ways of explaining things both familiar and foreign. English’s complexity is due to all of this adopting and assimilating, to the fact that we have two words for many things, especially if it’s something that we both live with on a regular basis, like a cow, and something that we eat, like beef.

English has also tended to play somewhat loosey-goosey with how to spell these assimilated words. Take my name for example, Seán Kane. Over the 28 years I’ve been around, I’ve seen people spell my first name four different ways, and my last name in even more variations. There’s Seán/Sean, Shawn, Shaun, and even Shon. With my last name, itself an English version of the Irish Ó Catháin, there’s the two spellings used in my family, Keane and Kane, as well as Cane, Caine, Cain, Kayne, Cayne, and Keene. When it comes to my first name, my given name, it’s easy, it’s Seán. Yeah, it’s not an English name, it’s still very Irish. Often, a name will tend to be one thing that’s assimilated that stays truest to its native form. But over time, as a name gains popularity, it’ll adapt to fit how an individual speaker figures it ought to be spelled.

English spelling on its own is a tricky topic, as anyone who’s studied English as a second language can affirm. Why is it that the words through and pew rhyme, but not trough and new? Simply put, English spelling began to be standardized with the introduction of the printing press in England in the late fifteenth century. The first English presses largely came from Dutch and Flemish-speaking printers in the Low Countries (modern Belgium, Luxembourg, & the Netherlands), who essentially began to use their own preferred spellings of English words in their books and pamphlets. Thus, we got an extra “h” in ghost where one was not present before. English spelling has generally stayed the same in the intervening 500 years, even while the language itself has changed.

So, today, I thought I might discuss a few changes I think could be helpful for us Anglophones, and for everyone else stuck learning this language. These are generally based off of things I’ve appreciated from other languages, you can guess which ones.

Possessives

When I was taught how to write the English possessive in elementary school, I was told that all you have to do is add an ‘s to the end of a word. So, if I wanted to write about the wings of a bird outside the window, all I had to write was the bird’s wings. But what if I wanted to write about something that a guy named James owned? Would I write James’ or James’s? At the time, my teacher told my class, “You choose which one you want to use, they both mean the same thing.” And for about fifteen years, I wrote James’. But when I was living in London, going through St. James’s Park tube station one day, I started wondering is there a difference between James’ and James’s?

The issue here is that saying it’s alright for people to write about a singular noun ending in an s possessing something as s’ only confuses that noun with any other plural noun. Why should the singular possessive James’ and the plural possessive birds’ have the same ending? I realized then why that station is called St. James’s Park, because it’s a park dedicated to only one of the two St. Jameses, not to both of them (which one remains to be seen). So, really the rule should be that the possessive ending of a noun ending in s should be s’s, and that the plural possessive in all cases in English should be s’. Why wasn’t I taught this? Probably because of custom, habit, or because that particular question hadn’t been thought about by that teacher or anyone else they had discussed it with.

If we clear up how to write a possessive ‘s ending on a noun, we’ll save a lot of people a lot of trouble. More often than not one this is one of my most frequent grammatical corrections on assignments that I grade. Explaining to students that the possessive of Athens is not Athen’s but Athens’s. If we explained the rule this way, there’s a better chance people would make sense of it and we’d clear up one big confusion.

And, or &

The conjunction and is a very solid word. It’s clear what it’s used for, and it’s usually hard to mess it up. But what it I told you there was a way to make its use even clearer? In Latin, the main word for and is et, but there is another way of expressing this particular conjunction. Latin has the capacity of adding a suffix, -que to a word to express a version of and that’s closer in proximity than the usual and. Take the classic name of the old Roman state: Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR). Usually, traditionally, this is translated as the Senate and People of Rome, but I personally prefer the Roman Senate and People because Romanus is an adjective.

But notice here the use of -que to mean and. Latin’s -que is not the same as English’s and in its purest form. Rather, -que refers to a close proximity between the two nouns being connected by it. In this case, it implies that the Roman Senate and the Roman People are arm in arm united in government. (Note, implies; political names are always ideals). Our and as it’s written can be interpreted to mean that same idea as -que a closer, more intimate sort of and, but not without context and interpretation. That said, we do have a symbol which means and, the ampersand (&), which itself is a stylized form of the Latin word et. So, why not adopt the very informal & into formal written English as our very own intimate conjunction?

Jack and Jill went up the hill together right? So, they went to fetch that proverbial pail of water as Jack & Jill. And what about a couple of newlyweds, surely they deserve to be represented in print as one grammatical phrase, united by a neat and tidy &. Instead of translating Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR) as the Roman Senate and People, a better translation, noting the ideal of the Roman state, would be the Roman Senate & People.

Spelling

Let’s go back to English spelling for a minute. When it comes to spelling, English is a lot like Spanish, by and large the language is spelled the same way anywhere English is spoken, with two main versions: UK & Commonwealth English, and US English. The differences here largely come from the work of one Noah Webster (1758-1843), who in his 1806 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language decided the new American republic ought to have its own version of English, distinct from the King’s English, so he decided to adopt some spellings over others as he saw fit. For example, we in the US spell honor closer to how it’s spelled in Latin, rather than as honour, which derives its spelling from Norman French. All this would be firmly established 22 years later in Webster’s more famous work the American Dictionary of the English Language, the first edition of the modern Webster’s Dictionary.

Today, though English doesn’t have an official academy or institution dictating the rules of the language or how it should be spelled, like French’s Académie Française, or Spanish’s Real Academia Española. English does have two main dictionary editorial boards that effectively do the same job. For UK & Commonwealth English there’s the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and for US English there’s Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary (MW). (Naturally, in true American fashion the double name is due to a corporate acquisition). These two dictionaries set the rules and standards within each of the varieties of written English, and provide standards for style and citation guides, like the friend of many a US-based historian, the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS).

As a result of this, English spelling reflects written conventions far more than it does the spoken language. As I noted in my post about Latin, each of the five, sometimes six, written vowels represent at least three sounds each in my own idiolect. This is thanks to the many layers of speech introduced to the language by waves of immigration to the Midwestern United States, which included all of my ancestors. There are hints of my ancestral languages in there: Irish, as well as some odd echoes of Welsh, Finnish, Swedish, and Flemish included. There’s also a sizable chunk of German phonology in the varieties of Midwestern American English, thanks to the predominance of German Americans in our part of the country.

It would then, quite possibly, be better for learners if we spelled English phonetically rather than per centuries-old written conventions. But if we do that, then each local variety of English would be spelled differently from the next. And how would we determine how to spell words? The only really good option would be to switch to spelling everything using IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. bʌt ɪf wi spɛl θɪŋz fəˈnɛtɪkli ˈjuzɪŋ aɪ-pi-eɪ, woʊnt ɪt luz sʌm ʌv ɪts ˌlɛʤəˈbɪləti?¹

Conclusion

English, it’s a tricky language to figure out. I only started with a couple things that I’d like to see changed with it, things that could well be improved upon. What are some things you’d like to see done with English? Please leave your comments below.

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¹ But if we spell things phonetically using IPA, won’t it loose some of its legibility?

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Corrections

24 March 2021: Added the Real Academia Española into the section about spelling in reference to the role that language academies play in French and Spanish.