Spelling bees: why they only happen in English.
Did you ever notice that other countries don’t have spelling competitions?
I’m sure that no matter if you’re a native speaker of English or not, you have cursed the English language. It’s the language that makes the least sense. I feel so sorry for people who have to learn it. I feel like I got lucky being a native speaker, although there are still aspects of this mongrel language that I struggle with.
That’s what it is. A mongrel language. It tries to be Germanic, but there are so many other influences that I don’t know what to class it as! Other (real) Germanic languages include German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. This is what makes English supposedly Germanic, as back in the middle ages, the Danes and the Vikings came over to England to invade and eventually settle. This meant sharing languages. People needed to communicate. However, the Romans had also settled in England, and so we also had Latin. This is why we have random silent letters, such as the ‘b’ in debt. It came from the Latin word ‘debitum,’ and so of course the English word needed to be exactly like the Latin. But English doesn’t work that way. To be honest, English doesn’t work full stop.
There are other influences, including many Romance languages (French and Italian, for example). A French influence is something called the ‘double-consonant rule.’ This was where if there were two consonants next to each other, the vowel sound was drawn out and was longer than if there was only one consonant. Examples include ‘drag’ and ‘dragged’ and ‘begin’ and ‘beginning.’ However, (yes, another one) there was interference. A word such as ‘timid’ has a longer vowel, so why is there a single consonant? The answer is, of course, Latin. Latin didn’t have this rule, and so because the word was spelt with one ‘m’ in Latin (timidus), it must be spelt with one ‘m’ in English.
If you think that it’s hard now, then you have no idea how bad it was in the olden days. Their main arguments for why English is the way that it is was logic, Latin, and maths.
You heard me.
Maths.
Why? We all know it makes no sense. Language is not like maths. Two negative words do not make a positive. Saying ‘I haven’t got none’ does not mean you do have something. And yet there is the constant telling off we get in school when we use double negatives — though the teachers conveniently forget that Shakespeare used double negatives as a way of emphasising something.
You’d think that once books arrived for the general public things would get better. And they did a bit. They helped with standardising the language, especially because a fixed language and dialect were selected to write in. This was the London dialect, and William Caxton decided this. He really just wanted to sell books though, so his motivation wasn’t exactly to educate the masses (I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt though — I’m sure he did want to educate people and give everyone a chance).
Standardising the written language means making it one which everyone can use. We now have Standard English, and if you are not familiar, it is the stereotypical English everyone seems to use. It is usually considered an accent-less variety, and the variety everyone learns, especially to write in. It is universal, and so this makes sense — everyone will be able to understand it enough to communicate with each other.
But the spelling. Need I say more? So much of the spelling makes zero sense. There are 26 letters of the alphabet, but 44 phonemes (these are different sounds). Why can’t we have phonetic spelling like Swedish! That actually makes sense. In English, we read and say words differently depending on the context. Object and object, content and content, read and read. And so many more. And I bet everyone who reads this will look at those words and pronounce them in a different order to other people. There is a rule though. The nouns have the stress in the first half of the word (OB-ject, CON-tent, etc) whereas verbs have the stress in the second half of the word (ob-JECT and con-TENT, etc).
I understand spelling tests in school; we need to learn how to spell some words correctly because we will probably use them at some point in our lives without the use of autocorrect. Spelling bees though, I don’t understand. Why does spelling need to be a competition? And sometimes it’s televised! You wouldn’t see this in any other language.
If anyone can offer any sort of explanation as to why this still happens, I would be very grateful.
