The Inglish Language

It seems all too appropriate that a language infamous for its quirks of spelling should display a quirk of spelling in its very name. The word English would reasonably guide total newcomers to pronounce it with a short E, like the one typically to be heard in pen. Instead, their ears are due to be stung by its initial short I-sound, like the one in pin, as if the word were written ‘Inglish’. Across most of English today, these are two separate vowels dependably represented by two separate letters: E and I. Yet, at the beginning of English, the former muscles in on the phonetic territory of the latter. This is quite the oddity. To my linguistically obsessed brain, no comparable words with this E-I mismatch readily come to mind.* Without such allies, it can’t be formulated and tolerated as a predictable rule. Upward and Davidson, in their mighty History of English Spelling, refer to the word as “a sound-symbol anomaly” (2011: 40). Nonetheless, we can try to explain and understand the…