David Crystal’s book is an enjoyable read, but it is mainly a belittling of the awfulness of English spelling and long excuse for it. It claims that “English spelling isn’t as bad as most people think’” that most of the choices of dictionary makers were quite reasonable and that knowledge of the history of English spelling can help with learning to spell.

I analyzed the spellings of the 7,000 most used English root words (i.e. including ‘word’ but not derivatives like ‘worded’, ‘wordy’ or ‘wording’) and found that 3,701 of them contained one or more unpredictable letters, as in ‘one, two, four, friend, said’ (now all listed in my English Spelling Problems blog). So my view is that English spelling is much worse than is generally believed.

He is completely wrong to claim that English spelling is difficult because it has to make do with 26 letters for 43 sounds. Combining letters like ‘ai’ or ‘sh’ for a sound causes no spelling difficulties when done consistently and when each sound has just one spelling, as in Finnish.

Learning to spell English is exceptionally difficult and takes a very long time, because its 43/44 sounds are spelt with 205 letters and letter strings, and over half of them are used completely unpredictably, e.g. ‘main – lane, vein, feign, campaign, champagne’.

And while acquaintance with the history of English spelling can help to fix a few of the thousands of tricky spellings in the minds of older students, as Crystal claims, this cannot be utilized by children when first learning to read and write, or by foreigners who generally want to learn to read and write English in a fairly short time.

I disagree with Crystal’s view of the history of English spelling too. I studied it, perusing numerous texts with original spellings. What struck me constantly was how people carelessly changed many spellings from earlier consistent and learner-friendly ones (e.g. Chaucer’s leve, sleve, believe; lern, erly, frend) to needlessly less regular and more difficult to learn ones (leave, sleeve, believe; learn, early, friend).

Masha Bell, Ex English teacher, independent

literacy researcher, Author of ebook “Spelling It Out,” Dorset, England