How English spelling differs from other writing systems

For native speakers of English it is not easy to appreciate how much English spelling differs from other alphabetic writing systems. Literate adults nearly all began to become acquainted with it at a very young age, on their parents’ laps, and they have generally taken quite a long time to master it. They were usually also never made deliberately aware of how much more time and effort, in comparison to other languages, English literacy acquisition takes.

To me the uniqueness of English spelling was made more obvious, because I did not begin to learn the language until the age of 14, before starting German the following year. My first languages were Lithuanian and Russian. I could not help but notice that the three others were all spelt much more consistently and could be learnt to read and write much faster. I have since spent much time investigating English spelling rules and exceptions and hope that I can now explain clearly how the English writing system differs from all other alphabetic ones.

Most languages have around 40 sounds. English has 43½ . (The half sound is any unstressed vowel, as in ‘certain, flatten, abandon’. It is never clearly audible, because only stressed English vowels can be heard properly (certain, flatten, abandon). Of those there is usually only one per word.)

All alphabetic writing systems start by obeying the basic alphabetic principle of using a grapheme (a letter like p, or a letter string like sh or ee) to spell one sound only (for example, sh - ee - p). Quite a few European languages conform to this principle entirely (Finnish) or fairly closely (Italian and Spanish). Finnish uses just 38 spellings for its 38 sounds. Other European languages have an average of 50 graphemes.

The Finnish orthography exemplifies alphabetic perfection. English spelling does the opposite. It uses 185 spellings for its 43½ sounds, and is the most irregular and hardest-to-master European writing system.

The first English spelling complication stems from 19 of its sounds being spelt with more than one grapheme. Sometimes this depends on being in the middle (sauce, late) or at the end of word (saw, lay); sometimes on the sounds which come after (c/at/ot/ut, kite/kept) or before it (pick, seek). This results in 81 basic spelling rules for the 43½ English speech sounds.

There are also 10 patterns for endings (father, ordinary, single) and prefixes (decide, indulge) and the consonant doubling rule (diner - dinner). This gives the English spelling system a total of 91 basic rules.

However, only 11 of the 91 basic English spelling rules have no exceptions
(Bed, Jug/ jog/ jab, gorge, ring, single, pin,
musician, this, thing, van, television).
The other 80 all get broken in at least one word (e.g. lips – llama), with 17 of them broken in so many different ways, and by so many words, that they cannot really be said to have any rule or pattern, as I will explain later.

The post 'Rules and exceptions of English spelling' shows the 80 basic English spelling rules which have exceptions and gives examples of all the different ways in which they get broken.