By learning the history and the principles, Crystal shows how the spellings that break all the rules become easier to get right. He unearths the stories behind the rogue words that confound us, and explains why these peculiarities entered the mainstream, in an epic journey taking in sixth century monks, French and Latin upstarts, the Industrial Revolution and the internet. Seventy-five per cent of English spelling is regular but twenty-five per cent is complicated, and in Spell It Out, our foremost linguistics expert David Crystal extends a helping hand to the confused and curious alike. He begins with the assumption that the spelling of English words was doomed from the outset when scribes attempted to match the numerous phonemes of Anglo-Saxon speech to the limited symbols of the Roman. Why is there an 'h' in ghost? William Caxton, inventor of the printing press and his Flemish employees are to blame: without a dictionary or style guide to hand in fifteenth century Bruges, the typesetters simply spelled it the way it sounded to their foreign ears, and it stuck. PDF On Dec 31, 2013, Alicia Mariscal published Resea de Spell it out: the singular story of English spelling (David Crystal, 2012) Find, read and cite. Martin’s Press, 2012), reminds us of why the subject of spelling is so fraught with difficulty. An enlightening tour of English spelling that untangles 'stationery' from 'stationary' - and explains why the 'i before e except after c' rule is so misleading. By learning the history and the principles, Crystal shows how the spellings that break all the rules become easier to get right.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |