English is sometimes described as orthographically ‘deep’ –
that means it is often not written as it sounds.
The language started on a small island which was invaded
several times by different groups of people. Each group influenced the language
spoken in England. It’s not very regular!
In English, however,
spelling is rarely changed when we take a word from another language. So ‘chef’
(from French) is not changed to ‘shef’, although this would be a better
phonetic spelling for this word in English.
The English spoken in many countries show great variation so
the spelling cannot reflect the pronunciation – or the spelling would also be
different in each country!
Then when the printing press arrived in England in the 16th
century, the early printers felt it was their job to standardise English
spelling and they made some strange decisions. It has been suggested that
‘women’ is spelled like that because the printers thought that all the up and
down strokes in ‘wimin’ would be too difficult to read. Now it’s just difficult
to spell!
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