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Throughout the history of the English language, these inconsistencies have gradually increased in number. There are a number of contributing factors. First, gradual changes in pronunciation, such as the Great Vowel Shift, accounts for many irregularities. Second, relatively recent loan words from other languages generally carry their original spellings, which are often not phonetic in English. Inconsistencies in the Romanization of languages using alphabets not derived from the Latin alphabet (e.g., Chinese) has further complicated this problem. Third, some prescriptionists have had partial success in their attempts to normalize the English language, forcing a change in spelling but not in pronunciation.
The regular spelling system of Old English was swept away by the Norman ConquestBayeux Tapestry depicting events leading to the Battle of Hastings The Norman Conquest was the conquest of England by William the Conqueror ( Duke of Normandy), in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings and the subsequent Norman control of England. It is an impor, and English itself was eclipsed by FrenchFrench le francais la langue francaise is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered only by Spanish and Portuguese. French is the 11th most spoken language in the world, spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother to for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, which for reasons of prestige and familiarity kept their French spellings. The spelling of Middle EnglishMiddle English is the name given to an early form of the English language that was in common use from roughly the 12th to the 15th centuries— from after the Norman invasion by William the Conqueror in 1066 to before the introduction of the printing press., such as in the writings of Geoffrey ChaucerChanticleer and the Fox at Ashby-de-la-Zouch castle Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343- 1400) was an English author, philosopher, diplomat, and poet, and is best known and remembered as the author of The Canterbury Tales''. He is sometimes credited with being the, is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled differently, sometimes even in the same sentence.
There was also a series of linguistic sound changes towards the end of this period, including the Great Vowel Shift. For example, this resulted in "igh" in "night" changing from a pure vowel followed by a velar fricative to a diphthong, and "stone" changing from two syllables to one. These changes for the most part did not detract from the rule-governed nature of the spelling system; but in some cases they introduced confusing inconsistencies, like the well-known example of the many pronunciations of "ough"For the purposes of this article, any word which has appeared in a recognised general English dictionary published in the 20th century or later is considered a candidate. Strange spellings Most people are aware that the letter y can serve as both a conson (rough, through, though, trough, plough, etc.). Most of these changes happened before the arrival of printing in England. However, the arrival of the printing press merely froze the current system, rather than providing the impetus for a realignment of spelling with pronunciation. Furthermore, it introduced further inconsistencies, partly because of the use of typesetters trained abroad, particularly in the Low CountriesThe Low Countries are the countries on low-lying land around the delta of the Rhine and Meuse rivers—usually used in modern context to mean the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg (an alternate modern term, more often used today, is Benelux). They roughly.
By the time dictionaries were introduced in the mid 1600s, the spelling system of English started to stabilize, and by the 1800s, most words had set spellings.