1. Why do we pronounce the /k/ in school but not schedule
Why do we pronounce the /k/ in school but not schedule? (/skεʤu:l/ is the American pronunciation)
Why do we pronounce ‘colonel’ as ‘kernel’
Orthography
Starter: can you think of any weird English spellings? Why do you think the spelling is so irregular?
Why are the vowels in words like ‘dawn’ and ‘claw’ spelt differently from the vowels in ‘horn’ and ‘born’, despite sounding the same?
Or lieutenant as ‘leftenant’ when there is no ‘f’?

2. Other issues with English spelling…
Some words have silent letters, e.g. knight, palm, lamb
Some words are spelt the same but sound different (homographs) e.g. read = the verb ‘to read’ in past or present tense, wind = a gust of wind or the verb to wind up
Some words are spelt differently but are pronounced the same way (homophones) e.g. their/there/they’re, sew/so, threw/through

3. How spelling in English has changed
The Roman alphabet was introduced into Britain by 6th century Christian missionaries. (Before this, our alphabet would have been runic.) The Old English alphabet was similar, but did not include some consonants (j, q, v, k and z were rarely used), while there were other sounds in Old English for which the Roman alphabet did not have a counterpart.
Old English was a phonetic language – words were spelt as they sounded and this meant that there could be very different spellings of the same words due to dialectal variations. E.g. ‘knight’ could be spelt ‘knyght’, ‘knyht’, ‘cniht’.

4. How spelling in English has changed
The Norman Conquest had a further influence on the spelling system – some OE letters such as æ were abandoned and k, q, x, z and th were used instead of the thorn, wynn, yogh, eth and long ∫ letters.
Caxton began the process to regularise spelling – as a printer it made sense for him to establish a spelling system that would mean that texts could be understood regardless of dialect.
However, Caxton wasn’t exactly regular with his own spellings (e.g. using ‘booke’ and ‘boke’ interchangeably). Further, the typesetters in Flanders did not have some of the letters such as thorn or yogh, using ‘th’ or ‘gh’ instead.
This is explains the ‘ye’ we often see – ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’ – this is due to Flemish typesetters using the ‘y’ to represent the unfamiliar letter thorn (ƥ).

5. How spelling in English has changed
Mid Eng
Mod Eng
Discussion
Sit
Seat
The short vowel has become a long vowel
Loss
Lose
Teem
Time
The long vowel has become a dipthong
Hoose
House
Noo
New
/nu:/ has become /nju:)
Boat
Boot
A dipthong becomes a long vowel
Phonetic change further complicated this.
The Great Vowel Shift (mid 14th-18th century) was a gradual changing of vowel pronunciation – the production of long vowels was raised so that the position of the tongue moved closer to the roof the mouth.
This led to a marked gap about grapheme and phoneme correspondence.
This was a gradual process – it is not clear exactly why the process began, but we can see evidence of this through rhymes and spelling changes from Middle English.
TASK: watch this video of David and Ben Crystal discussing Shakespeare and original pronunciation. Make notes.
Blood was initially spelt ‘blod’ but eventually came to be spelt ‘blud’ illustrates a move towards a longer vowel.

6. How spelling in English has changed
Further changes happened during the Renaissance (14th-16th) due to borrowings from French and Latin were already embedded into the language, but some felt that it was important to establish the etymology of a word through its spelling.
E.g. adventure came from French (‘aventure’) but the ‘d’ was added to draw on the Latin ‘adventura’.

7. TASK: how has the spelling changed in this text?

8. Notes

9. Evaluate the idea that language standards are worsening.

10. Key expectations
/30 = /20 for AO2 (i.e. theorists), /10 for AO1 (language levels)
Therefore, A LOT of wider reading and revision of key theorists from AS Level is required.
I expect you to mention at least three different theorists per paragraph.
You will need to do some additional wider reading.
For your AO1, you can use both data from lessons and your own research.
If you do this research for essays now, you will not need to do it later.
One week to complete the work.