SPELLBOUND: THE SURPRISING ORIGINS AND ASTONISHING SECRETS OF ENGLISH SPELLING, by James Essinger, Delta, 305 pages, $13
Written by prolific author and Oxford graduate James Essinger, "Spellbound" is an entertaining book that is both useful and surprising.
Tracing a language can be tricky, especially when so much of its development is illogical, so Essinger calls his book "a detective story."
Essinger also thinks the English language is "preposterously complex and endlessly fascinating," and his book comes very close to proving that claim. He considers the writing of English to be closer to magic than any of the tricks of Merlin, Houdini or even Harry Potter. It also can "confer a kind of immortality on a writer," because it acts to preserve writing.
Essinger writes: "Rather than ridiculing English spelling, or resigning ourselves to regarding it as a nightmare, it's more useful — and in fact also more true — to see English spelling as something like a vast family of children that came from all over the world and have been lovingly fostered and nurtured into the adults we are likely to meet anytime we choose to write the words that represent these 'members of the family."'
Moreover, the author adds, "You might as well enjoy your vast family of grown up foster children, whose origins may date from last week or from A.D. 500. Because, like it or not, you don't have any real choice about the way English is spelled any more than you do about what the words of spoken English actually are."
That said, Essinger traces the evolution of the language from the invasion of Britain by Germanic tribes when Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and the Roman alphabet was modified into an English alphabet, about A.D. 597.
The letters Q and Z did exist in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet, but Anglo-Saxons tried to avoid them, as in "cwen" for "queen" and "cwic" for "quick." The language over the years gradually developed into a more simplified structure — but the standard of spelling was virtually invisible.
According to Essinger, the English we speak today now contains about 60 percent words from Anglo-Saxon and 40 percent from Norman French, French or Latin. The author uses many different words as examples of the evolution, and he also quotes verse written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1300s and translates it into modern English so that the reader can see how much the words and construction have changed.
Just as the language evolved over many, many years, it continues to do so, just as new words crop up in the dictionary every year, based on invention and then actual usage. If a word, even if a corrupt version of a couple of old words, is used enough in society, it is adopted as an English word — no matter what grammarians may think — and it goes into the dictionary.
This lively book is written without jargon, enabling readers from widely different backgrounds to understand it and enjoy it.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com