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The Romans helped get the Anglo-Saxon language into writing, but when the French arrived with William the Conqueror in 1066, they brought their own words with them-and English vocabulary was never the same again. This! Is! How ‘jeopardy’ came to be spelled ‘jeopardy’! / Amanda Edwards/GettyImages Woden’s day has gone through various spellings- wodnesdaeg, Weodnesdei, Wenysday, wonysday, Weddinsday-but even though Shakespeare tried to match pronunciation with his very reasonable Wensday, it didn’t stick. He also had a career in curing horses and carrying off the dead, and Wednesday is his day.
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Woden was an Anglo-Saxon god associated with both fury and poetic inspiration. But by the time the change was complete, the writing habits had already been established. Along with the vowel changes, English lost the “k” sound from kn words, the “w” sound from wr words, and the “g” sound from gnat and gnaw. This is why we ended up with so much inconsistency: ea sounds different in knead, bread, wear, and great. People were changing the way they pronounced vowels in vast groups of words, but the publishers weren’t recognizing the changes yet. At the very same time, the Great Vowel Shift was underway. First, the new technology of the printing press meant publishers-rather than scribes-were in charge, and they started to standardize spelling. Two things happened in the early 1500s that really messed with English spelling. Why does ‘knead’ have a ‘k’? / Ross Woodhall/Image Source/Getty Images Today, whenever you see one of those gh spellings, say a little “ach!” in the memory of English “/x/.” 2. Later, English lost the “/x/” sound, but only after the spelling conventions had been well established. Some of the spellings thought has gone through include þoht, ðoght, þouȝte, thowgth, thouch, thotht, thoughte, and thowcht. For a while they made use of runic characters ( þ, ȝ, ð) and various combinations of g, c, and h. They had to come up with ways to spell sounds like “th” and “/x/”-a back of the throat consonant like the one in German word ach. Way back in the 600s, Christian missionaries arrived in Anglo-Saxon England with their Roman alphabet and tried to make it fit the language they found there. Here’s a brief look at the history of English spelling told through 11 words. There aren’t always good reasons for these inconsistencies, but there are reasons. “Also, kids should reach for our book because of the purple turban-wearing pteranodon with a skin condition,” adds the author.Why is English spelling so messed up? We get the same sounds spelled different ways ( two, to, too), the same spellings pronounced different ways (the ch in chrome, machine, attach), and extra letters all over the place that don’t even do anything ( knee, gnu, pneumatic). While he says that the basics are important, he thinks that kids should be trusted to learn the more difficult words. It can be enormously frustrating, for example, to have a particular set of spelling rules drilled into one’s head, only to discover later that “I before E” is a giant conspiracy,” says Chris. “We tend to underestimate our children when we present an overly simplified version of the world in teaching certain subjects. To create the wonderful illustrations, they hired illustrator Maria Beddia: “I can’t think of anyone else who could’ve so beautifully interpreted our crazy requests, like having ‘a french leopard and a tiny witch sitting in a creepy Victorian home playing the Ouija board,” says Raj. The book took almost three years to complete and neither of the two realized how long it would take. For those, we had to put some significant time and effort into creating clever workarounds that still matched the overall spirit of the book.” “Other letters were much trickier, with few if any appropriate words to choose from. They picked the words that they felt were the most engaging to young readers, like “pterodactyl” and “knight”. Raj said that they collected words in a Google document for a few months and after a while, they realized that the words a “fantastic universe full of gnomes, czars, and tsunamis”. In an interview with Bored Panda, Chris said that the idea came when the duo saw a kid playing with alphabet cards at a friend’s house. “We both got a laugh out of the card for “Q” which read: “Q is for Quinoa.” That was so entertaining to us because, well, what little kid knows or cares about quinoa? And also, isn’t that a terrible “Q” word, considering that it isn’t even phonetic?” It was at that moment that the friends decided to create a book full of these types of words.