4 ms·

English is way too irregular for this to work. Good examples are reign vs. sovereign and isle vs. island. The etymologies aren't linked and the modern spellings

English is way too irregular for this to work. Good examples are reign vs. sovereign and isle vs. island. The etymologies aren't linked and the modern spellings are basically due to scholars presuming the etymologies are linked and adjusting their spelling to reflect that.

DiscourseFan 4y ago
>reign vs. sovereign this is actually explained by something called the Indo-European ablaut, or as the Indians who original came up with this call it, Guna and Vrddhi. Basically, there is a set of vowel grades in the IE languages: a -> (long) a -> (long) a; i -> e -> ai; u -> o -> au; (vowel) r -> ar -> (long) ar. The reason for the ablaut changes are fairly complex, but notice how in your example reign has the "e" as in pain, whereas "sovreign" has the "i" as in "bit", reign is actually the "guna" or first grade of the ablaut. English spelling doesn't generally represent these changes, nor does it have to, because people are aware of the sequence without knowing it, and those sound changes do not sound strange or out of place for them. >scholars presuming the etymologies are linked and adjusting their spelling to reflect that English actually has no official spelling for any words, its just that the King James bible was the first widely distributed printed book that people were able to read in the English speaking world, so people adopted the spellings for words in that book. Its quite arbitrary, which makes the elegance of the spelling system even better--the fact that no one got involved meant that we were able to create this beautifully complex system that could represent nearly an infinite number of sounds, because nobody tried to "standardize" and phoneticize English spelling.
- tragomaskhalos 4y ago
  This brings us to Sanskrit, which holds as its highest virtue the strict correspondence of spelling to sound, much to the dismay of learners who must at an early stage tackle the complex sandhi rules that enforce this.
  - DiscourseFan 4y ago
    The irony there is that Sandhi seemingly developed later, early Vedic Hymns, like Ancient Greek texts, have very relatively few external sandhi operations.

DiscourseFan 4y ago

>reign vs. sovereign this is actually explained by something called the Indo-European ablaut, or as the Indians who original came up with this call it, Guna and Vrddhi. Basically, there is a set of vowel grades in the IE languages: a -> (long) a -> (long) a; i -> e -> ai; u -> o -> au; (vowel) r -> ar -> (long) ar. The reason for the ablaut changes are fairly complex, but notice how in your example reign has the "e" as in pain, whereas "sovreign" has the "i" as in "bit", reign is actually the "guna" or first grade of the ablaut. English spelling doesn't generally represent these changes, nor does it have to, because people are aware of the sequence without knowing it, and those sound changes do not sound strange or out of place for them. >scholars presuming the etymologies are linked and adjusting their spelling to reflect that English actually has no official spelling for any words, its just that the King James bible was the first widely distributed printed book that people were able to read in the English speaking world, so people adopted the spellings for words in that book. Its quite arbitrary, which makes the elegance of the spelling system even better--the fact that no one got involved meant that we were able to create this beautifully complex system that could represent nearly an infinite number of sounds, because nobody tried to "standardize" and phoneticize English spelling.

tragomaskhalos 4y ago
This brings us to Sanskrit, which holds as its highest virtue the strict correspondence of spelling to sound, much to the dismay of learners who must at an early stage tackle the complex sandhi rules that enforce this.
- DiscourseFan 4y ago
  The irony there is that Sandhi seemingly developed later, early Vedic Hymns, like Ancient Greek texts, have very relatively few external sandhi operations.