Good-bye !

I am surprised that professional word-smith Bernard Shaw campaigned for a change in the spelling of the English language.  He pointed out, quite rightly, that the way we spell is often bewildering to learners of the language - whether British or Foreign:  his solution was that we should spell phonetically.  My surprise is not so much that his suggestion is impracticable (it would require not only changing the spelling of thousands of English words, but also the symbols - letters or whatever -  that are needed to represent them); but that he sems to have overlooked that fact of the inevitable continuous, if gradual, changes in the actual way we pronounce our words.

Our words (or the basic elements in them) are based on Anglo-Saxon - a language that centuries before the Norman conquest had evolved in pronunciation from continental and Indo-European languages, and who knows what even more primitive ones earlier still.  Middle English is the name given to the form our language had taken round about the fourteenth century, at which period we started borrowinng words from French (itself a much evolved tongue based on Latin.  In fact Latin itself had evolved over centuries).

Our Saxon forebears said 'mihte' in two syllables; we now say 'might', in one.  Some spoke of  'wereled', others of 'woreld'; we say 'world'.  They said 'worthscipe', whereas we way 'worship'. They spoke of 'seorewe'; for us it has become 'sorrow'.  These variations are essentially the same words - it is just that the way they are pronounced has changed.  Changing the spelling won't halt this language evolution.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in Shaw's plan is the undoubted fact that even if the spelling remains un changed, the pronunciation of words alters over the generations.  The sound 'oi' in words like spoil and boil was sounded like 'eye' as recently as the eighteenth century:  in the rhyming couplets of Alexander Pope those words were twinned with 'beguile' and 'pile'.

Think what happened to the greeting 'God be with you'. It was garbled over the centuries until it became 'Good-bye'.  Today we may well say "have a 'pepmint" instead of wasting breathe on the three-syllable 'peppermint'.  And only a week ago I heard a TV reporter or presenter distinctly say 'p'tickler' for 'particular'.  I must say I rather like spelling it that way:  is that what Bernard Shaw wanted ?

Good-bye !