You can't spell 'Slaughter' without 'Laughter'

Question

...and yet they are pronounced very differently.

/ˈslɔtər/ vs /ˈlɑːftə(r)/ For those who don't read 'pronunciation': Slaw-ter vs Laff-ter

Similarly: Homographs (words spelled identically but pronounced differently) run into the same issue for an English language learner.

Examples:

After weeks in the desert the troops began to desert their fellows.

You can lead someone into a dark alley and then club them with a lead pipe.

She wound the bandage around his head wound (after he was hit with a lead pipe for deserting his fellows).

What is the best way to explain to a learner of English why the pronunciation differences exist and how to avoid the trap presented by homographs and other near-homographs (like s/laughter)?

Answer 1

The best way to explain why the same letter patterns are pronounced differently in different words is just to explain the actual historical reasons for it. You'll have to choose the timing and the amount of detail to suit your students, but here are the main facts:

1. The Latin alphabet had about 23 letters but Anglo-Saxon and Middle English had about 45 phonemes. This meant that the same letters had to stand for multiple sounds. This especially causes ambiguity with vowels, which is why 'ou' and 'au' are particularly troublesome. Latin had no 'aw', short 'o͝o', or short 'ă' sound, and no letters for them. The two-letter combinations 'sh', 'ch', 'th', and 'dg' represent consonants not found in Latin. Anglo-Saxon writers represented hard and soft 'th' by two runic letters, 'þ' and 'ð', but not very consistently, and they fell out of use shortly after printing began. There's lots more, but you get the idea: too many phonemes and not enough letters due to imposing the Latin alphabet onto English.

2. Most silent letters stand for sounds that have entirely dropped out of modern English. For example, knight was pronounced /kniçt/. Modern English no longer has /ç/ (like German Ich), and in Modern English, /kn/ can't start a syllable. (A few dialects still retain these sounds, though.) This is why 'gh' is particularly ambiguous: sometimes it was dropped, and sometimes it shifted to /f/.

3. The use of 'o' to represent short 'ŭ' before 'v', 'n', and 'm', as in oven, ton, and come, developed when 'u' and 'v' were both the same letter. 'vv' and 'vn' were written as four short, vertical strokes—just like 'nn' or 'nu'. 'vm' was five vertical strokes, just like 'mv'. Writing the 'ŭ' as 'o' in these circumstances clarified the writing at the expense of complicating the spelling rules.

4. Anglo-Saxon and Middle English pronunciation varied a great deal from region to region, so there was no way to make a single spelling for all the regional pronunciations. Indeed there was no standardization of spelling in Middle English. Standard spellings didn't take root until dictionaries started coming out in the 1600s, and not really until Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755. Standardization tended to favor the London pronunciation, but occasionally froze one region's pronunciation with another region's spelling; bury is the most famous example.

5. Silent 'e' was pronounced in Middle English. It's silent in Modern English but still retains two roles in spelling: softening preceding 'c' and 'g', and making the previous vowel long if both stressed and separated from the 'e' by only one consonant. The latter is due to a rule of Anglo-Saxon pronunciation that a stressed vowel is long before one consonant and another vowel, and short before two consonants and another vowel. This is why we have a lot of doubled letters in words of Anglo-Saxon origin: to indicate that the preceding vowel should not go long; for example, ban becomes banned.

6. The business with soft and hard 'c' and 'g' comes from changes in the pronunciation of Latin that occurred in Europe somewhere around 200–600 A.D. This convention came to English with the Norman invasion of 1066. The Norman invasion also brought English the great majority of its modern vocabulary, and its basically French spellings for all the new words. French had nothing like the aforementioned rule of doubled consonants and short vowels. This is why we write liberty and lateral (French-style spelling) rather than libberty and latteral (Anglo-Saxon-style spelling).

7. Johnson's dictionary cemented the convention of spelling words to reflect their etymology. Hence the "three spelling systems" in my first attempt at an answer. Johnson goofed on a lot of his etymologies and introduced a number of inadvertent inconsistencies, some of which have stuck and some of which are forgotten. There hasn't been much standardization for spelling words that come from languages other than Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek. Competing standards for Hebrew, for example, result in Chanukah as well as Hanukkah; the situation with Arabic is a catastrophe. But overall, Johnson's approach is the modern approach: choosing spellings to distinguish roots with different meanings while trying to respect old precedents, making reasonable compromises between many competing concerns.

8. Noah Webster's dictionaries of 1806–41 got rid of a number of irregularities and simplified a number of French-style spellings, resulting in the divide between American and British spelling. Webster adhered to the principle of etymological spelling, following it more consistently than before. For example, he changed the the British/French -ise suffix to the more etymologically faithful -ize.

To summarize: English spelling arose first from a Procrustean fit to an alphabet without enough letters, and accumulated lots of tweaks and compromises to adapt to problems like invaders with a new language and changes in pronunciation. Eventually, a mostly etymology-based spelling system emerged which turned the "more phonemes than letters" problem into a virtue: using the different ways of spelling the same sound to represent morphemes rather than phonemes consistently (except for all those aforementioned irregularities).

Hopefully, as each quirk of spelling comes up, you can provide just enough history so that students can at least understand the reason for it. They might find some reasons disappointing, as in the case of slaughter, and they might find others enlightening, like why improvise doesn't have a 'z'. Either way, understanding the reasons for English spelling makes it a whole lot easier to learn and remember. It should at least clear the feeling of hopelessness that descends when it starts looking like English spelling is nothing but exceptions.

Answer 2

It is mostly a matter of historical accident. From the outset English spelling represented a compromise between competing native, French and Latin schemata. In Middle English spelling began to be standardized, informally; but this was a time when actual pronunciation was changing very rapidly. As the process went forward both pronunciations and spellings continued to change, often in very different directions, with competing dialectal versions and analogy between similar words and different morphological forms of the same word exerting varying influences.

And once a spelling was in place "installed base" constraints kept it there: the only people concerned with spelling were people who could read and write, and they naturally resisted any change which would cut them off from their literary tradition or require them to learn new standards.

Consequently, for a very large proportion of English words the relationship between spelling and pronunciation today is largely historical.

And there really is no way to "avoid the trap". There are patterns which historical linguists recognize, but they have no predictive value; you can only know what pattern applies after the fact, by comparing the written and spoken forms.

I'm afraid your students are going to have to learn spellings and pronunciations the same way native speakers do: by reading and hearing them, and by looking them up.

Answer 3

Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.

(From Gerard Nolst Trenité's "The Chaos" (1922), either the best or worst thing ever written about the idiosyncratic pronunciation of English, depending on your point of view.)

Personally, the single most important thing I have found in analogous situations (and even in learning English, my mother tongue) is to have the potential points of confusion pointed out explicitly and expressly clarified. You might say:

Yes, slaughter and laughter are one letter different, but they are pronounced very differently. They do not rhyme. Because English.

Hammer home the point that English pronunciation is, fundamentally, arbitrary. Historical explanations are our "Just-So" stories and our so-called "rules" are heuristics at best. By all means, use them where they have mnemonic value, but don't believe in them.

Answer 4

Everyone who learns English needs to know that English has different spelling rules for each language that it borrows from. English is mainly a combination of three languages:

1. The core of English is a relatively small vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon words. When spellings were standardized, the spellings of the Anglo-Saxon words reflected a variety of different regional pronunciations in England. These pronunciations are long gone but the spellings remain. This is where we get laughter, slaughter, rough, tough, thought, ought, might, night, knight, eight, two, bury, and nearly all English words with "irregular" spellings. There really aren't very many of these words in common use, but they are very commonly used, and you do have to memorize them one-by-one.

2. The great majority of English comes from Latin via French. Almost all of these words have regular spelling. For example: liquid, library, labor, legislate, languish, liberty, latent, lateral. However, pronunciation alone doesn't dictate the spelling. Each word-element with a distinct meaning has its own spelling. For example, -tion in Latin-derived words is pronounced /ʃən/ and means that the word is a noun made from a verb, as in organization. There's a little irregularity because the Latin rules are still followed in English, so you have transmission rather than transmition or transmitation, and, as in Latin, there's often no hint about whether a vowel should be long or short (as in lateral).

3. A small but important set of English words comes from Ancient Greek. For example, metaphor, synthesis, synchronize, democracy, idiosyncrasy, monarchy, monopoly, kleptomaniac, chrysanthemum. Most of these words have regular spelling, too, but the English letters are chosen to reflect the Greek letters in the words they came from. In synthesis, the syn- root means together, the y reflecting the Greek letter upsilon, and the -sis root means about the same as the Latin -tion, the i reflecting the Greek letter iota.

You don't have to know all the details of what came from what, but you do have to know that English spelling works by reflecting the etymological roots of each word. Each root has its own spelling, which indicates both meaning and pronunciation. English spelling is actually a pretty sophisticated compromise between purely representing meaning, like Chinese characters, and purely representing pronunciation, which varies by region and changes over the centuries.

English spelling isn't so much irregular as complicated (except for that small set of famous Anglo-Saxon words, of course). This reflects its huge vocabulary, the other languages it borrows from, its literate history, and its enormous geographic spread.

Answer 5

I think the question how to explain the different pronunciation of letter groups with the same spelling depends very much on how old the learners are. When they are very young I doubt that long historical explanations will be of any use as it is complicated to make such historical processes plausible and I guess that for most teachers it is a task beyond their abilities as such things really are difficult.

Such differences can occur because words have a different history. "slaughter" is assumed to have come into English via Norsk where the letter group gh had become silent, whereas in Old English to laugh gh was still spoken and changed later to an f-sound.

In German schlachten (to slaughter) and lachen (to laugh) are still pronounced with the same ch-sound.

For young learners I would simple demonstrate that in English the same letter groups can have different pronunciation. Slaughter and laughter are a good example. I would give four or five other examples to show this curiosity. But I would avoid giving long historical explanations. Children can accept that things are as they are without technical explanations. It is difficult to convey historical processes in language to young learners.