English Quiz
English kept its old spellings while the sounds moved on.
An English quiz with answers about the language rather than its grammar rules. It follows words back to where they came from and explains a few of the oddities that puzzle learners and native speakers alike.
Did you know?
- The 'Ye' in signs such as 'Ye Olde Shoppe' was never pronounced with a y. Old English had a letter called thorn for the 'th' sound. Early printers, whose type came from the continent and lacked it, used a y instead, so 'ye' was simply a way of printing 'the'.
- Unlike French or Spanish, English has no official academy to rule on what is correct. Proposals to create one were made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and came to nothing. Dictionaries therefore describe how the language is actually used rather than laying down the law.
- The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary took about seventy years, from a proposal in 1857 to the final volume in 1928. Much of the evidence came from volunteers, who posted millions of paper slips with quotations showing how each word had been used.
How English became the language it is
English began as the speech of Germanic peoples who settled in Britain from the fifth century. The language of that period, Old English, would be unreadable to most modern speakers without study: it had grammatical genders, case endings and several letters that have since vanished. Its best-known poem, Beowulf, survives in a single manuscript copied around a thousand years ago. Most of the vocabulary of that time has since dropped out of use, although the survivors include many of the commonest words, such as 'water', 'house' and 'be'.
Printing fixes the spelling
William Caxton set up England's first printing press at Westminster in 1476. Printers had to choose one spelling for words that were pronounced differently from region to region, and their choices slowly became standard. Some of Caxton's typesetters had trained in Flanders and brought habits with them; the silent h in 'ghost' is usually blamed on Flemish spelling. Because pronunciation kept changing after print had frozen the written forms, the gap between the two widened.
The dictionary makers
The first English dictionary, published by Robert Cawdrey in 1604, explained about 2,500 'hard words'. Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755 defined some 40,000 and illustrated them with quotations from literature, a method later dictionaries copied. In the United States, Noah Webster's dictionary of 1828 promoted simpler spellings such as 'color' and 'center', which is the origin of most differences between American and British spelling today.
A borrowing language
English has always taken words from the languages it meets. 'Shampoo' comes from Hindi, 'robot' from Czech, 'tsunami' from Japanese and 'ketchup' probably from a Chinese dialect by way of Malay. Today it is spoken by roughly a billion and a half people, most of whom learned it as a second language, and new varieties with their own vocabulary and rhythm have grown up in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.