Transcript Episode 33: Why spelling is hard — but also hard to change

lingthusiasm:

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 33: Why spelling is hard — but also hard to change. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 33 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about why spelling is so hard and also hard to change. But first, Gretchen, it’s almost time for your book to be out in the world, and I am very excited.

Gretchen: I am also very excited for people to finally get to read it. But you have already read my book about internet linguistics.

Lauren: I have. This is why I get to be excited, because I know people are in for a treat.

Gretchen: In fact, you are featured a little bit in my book about internet linguistics, which was very funny because as I was talking about everybody else in the book, I was referring to everybody by their last names, and when I got to you, I was like, “I’m guess I’m calling her ‘Gawne’ for this book.”

Lauren: Oh, my gosh. Really?

Gretchen: Despite the fact that, of course, I normally call you “Lauren.”

Lauren: That is gonna be so amazing. I may have to listen to the audiobook just to laugh at that.

Gretchen: Just so you can laugh at how I don’t have a cot/caught distinction and so I can’t actually do the vowel that you do in your name.

Lauren: That’s okay. I’m just really excited. The book is great. People can pre-order it now. And its out on the 23rd of July?

Gretchen: That’s correct.

Lauren: You were explaining to me why pre-orders were so important. I’m learning a lot about books from you. It’s an interesting world.

Gretchen: Pre-orders are really important because, first of all, they help the publisher decide literally how many copies to print because they have a sense of how much people are interested in the book. Also, because when they’re trying to count book sales for whether something ends up as a bestseller or is on some sort of list, all of the pre-order sales count towards that first week of sales. So, if you’re likely to end up on a bestseller list, it’s gonna be the first week, and the pre-orders all count towards that. It’s huge. If you’re excited for any book, really, you should pre-order it. And you should definitely pre-order mine!

Lauren: Excellent. There’ll be a link to that in the show notes.

Gretchen: It is called “Because Internet” and is available where good books are sold. But there’ll be a link to that.

Lauren: This month’s Patreon bonus episode is an interview with Alice Gaby, which is all about how we use directions in language and her work with an Australian language, Kuuk Thaayorre. It was from our November liveshow in Melbourne.

Gretchen: Alice’s research is so interesting. It was really fun to do in the liveshow because we got to have a whole room of people in an auditorium point where they thought north was and see how good people are at telling different directions, and whether linguistic or cultural factors affect how good you are at directions or what types of directions you pay attention to or you notice. I also got to quiz her on some Canadianisms.

Lauren: That was pretty great. We returned the favour by quizzing you on some Australianisms that Alice chose.

Gretchen: Yes. That was very fun. You can listen to that and many other bonus episodes by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, which we’ll also link to in the show notes.

[Music]

Gretchen: Why is spelling so hard, Lauren? Why do we spend years and years learning how to spell and then we still mess it up?

Lauren: When you say “we,” I think you mean me. I am definitely the more prone to misspelling out of the two of us. Let’s just get that out of the way.

Gretchen: I misspell things, but then I also notice them before the post goes up. Whereas, you put a post up and then I message you being like, “Hey. I wanna reblog your post. Can you just fix this typo?”

Lauren: I would like to just say that I have a medieval manuscript approach to spelling, which is gonna be really important, and we’ll explain why in this episode. But part of the reason that English spelling is hard is that it is a long and storied history. Every word is like this great little time-capsule nugget of linguistic information.

Gretchen: I like to think of English spelling not so much as a phonetic approach to spelling – we don’t spell based on how something sounds – we spell based on where a word comes from. So, if a word comes from Old English versus if a word comes from French, or from Latin, or from Greek, or from one of the many other languages that English has borrowed words from, English tends to keep each word’s original spelling conventions or older spelling conventions, and then those come into conflict with each other. That’s what makes it really difficult.

Lauren: But it makes it so great as well.

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