Certain spelling regimes have been forced on us

Genesis 11 reports that God “confused” the language of Babel in order to frustrate their attempt to emulate him. The claim is that, as recently as the sixth century BC, humanity was still speaking only one language.

This is unacceptable soon after an earlier chapter — Genesis 10 — has described all kinds of language families. It is true, however, that, like Monsieur Jourdain — the character in Moliere’s theatre piece Le Bourgeois-Gentilhomme, who used to marvel when told that he had been speaking prose all his life, human beings were deploying language many millennia before they invented the wonderful technique of writing.

What has remained “confused” ever since that invention is only spelling. Whenever it exists, a spelling regime has been deliberately imposed by individuals.

The spelling of modern French was probably imposed by the Academie Francaise many centuries ago. English and French seem to be the only systems in which the speech of one dead language is used to spell a living descendant.

That is why, in both languages, the written form is so different from the spoken.

Pronunciation

It is that the words are written exactly as they were once pronounced, whereas their pronunciation has changed drastically.

In the 13th century, the English word “though”, for instance, was uttered with a heavy “gh” guttural at the end of it.

The “gh” sounded much like the “kh” in the Luhya name Khakhudu.

The “ch” in the German word doch (the etymological first cousin of “though”) is still pronounced with that a guttural.

But although, in pronunciation, English has long ago dropped the “gh” from a word like through (German durch), the “gh” remains imperative in writing.

Only in the United States and among the more risque of fiction writers – where “through” frequently appears as “thru” in writing — have there been attempts to update spelling to reconcile it with pronunciation. But — as everybody knows – these attempts have been laughably half-hearted.

In German, then, orthography is in general accord with pronunciation.

Phonetic languages

Languages in which pronunciation tallies almost exactly with spelling are said to be “phonetic”. That, I suppose, is because the writing obeys the “phone”. It obeys – that is to say – the sound or pronunciation of each word.

All Latin languages (except French) are more or less phonetic.

So are all Teuto-Germanic languages (except English). So are all Bantu languages, including even Kiswahili, whose native speakers have been literate for 10 centuries.

So are all Nilotic languages (except ancient Coptic, whose writing – called Hieroglyphics — was more symbolic than lettered).

In the study of language, orthography – from the Latin ortographia – deals with the conventional or standard spelling of the words of a given language. The ortho part of it means “correct”.

We are familiar with it in the word “orthodox”, by which one Christological faction claims to possess the only “correct” doxy (“doctrine” or “teaching”).

The graphia part, of course, means “writing” – as we know from, for instance, Geography (which literally means “earth writing”) and telegraphy (which refers to “long-distance writing”).

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