Why English spelling is so

weird

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English spelling is so weird

B2 Listening Test
Watch a video about the history of English
spelling. For questions 1 to 8, decide if the
sentences are true or false. You can see the
transcription after submitting your answers.

Why is English Spelling So …

Listening comprehension test

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1 When Christian missionaries arrived in

England, they started to use spellings that didn’t

reflect how words were pronounced.

a. True
b. False

This question was not answered

Transcription
It starts back around the year 600 A.D. when
Christian missionaries arrived in England
with their Roman alphabet. They found the
Anglo-Saxons, who spoke a Germanic
language, with different kinds of sounds like
[th] and [x] that Latin didn't have. So scribes
came up with their own ways to write them.
Over a long time everyone finally settled on
the gh for the [x], but there is no [x] in
thought! Anymore. The pronunciation
changed over hundreds of years. [x] turned
to [f] in words like cough and enough, or
disappeared entirely in words like though or
thought.

2 Words like cough, enough, though or

thought were originally pronounced with the

same sound at the end.

a. True
b. False

This question was not answered

Transcription
It starts back around the year 600 A.D. when
Christian missionaries arrived in England
with their Roman alphabet. They found the
Anglo-Saxons, who spoke a Germanic
language, with different kinds of sounds like
[f] and [j] that Latin didn't have. So scribes
came up with their own ways to write them.
Over a long time everyone finally settled on
the gh for the [j], but there is no [j] in
thought! Anymore. The pronunciation
changed over hundreds of years. [j] turned to
[f] in words like cough and enough, or
disappeared entirely in words like though or
thought.

3 When the printer was invented, the

changes in pronunciation had finished.

a. True
b. False

This question was not answered

Transcription
As those changes were getting underway,
the printing press was invented and that was
great for the spread of written English, but
unfortunately it was also great for the spread
for the spellings that printers had decided on
before the pronunciation changes already in
progress were complete.

4 The pronunciation of English vowels

changed a lot.
a. True
b. False

This question was not answered

Transcription
Other pronunciation changes that happened
over this time period where the loss of
certain sounds at the beginning of words and
an almost complete overhaul of the entire
vowel system of English known as the great
vowel shift.

5 A big part of modern spelling is due to how

words were pronounced in the past or how they

were spelled in French.

a. True
b. False

This question was not answered

Transcription
So for the most part, the answer to "why do
we spell it that way?" is either "because we
used to pronounce it that way" or "because
that's how they did it in French."

6 Latin started influencing spelling in the late

1500s, when English spelling was still

undergoing big changes.

a. True
b. False

This question was not answered

Transcription
In the late 1500s, English spelling had
stabilised well enough, but some
Renaissance scholars who were all fired up
about classical Latin and Greek decided not
to leave well enough alone.

7 Latin was responsible for the introduction

of letters that are written but not pronounced.

a. True
b. False

This question was not answered

Transcription
They decided words like receipt, salmon,
indict, and debt, needed to put their Latin
roots and better display, so they purposely
added letters that no one had ever
pronounced in English.

8 The pronunciation of the word colonel

comes from Italy.

a. True
b. False

This question was not answered

Transcription
That's what happened with colonel. We
borrowed it from French, along with a lot of
other military vocabulary, in the 1500s. Back
then they said it and spelled it as coronel.
Later English scholars started translating old
Italian military treatises, where it was
collonelo. Time goes by, and wouldn't you
know it, people are spelling it the Italian way
and pronouncing it the French way.

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