ABSTRACT
The most important aspect of the English writing system is that words actually have a spelling. This is so obvious that it can be easily overlooked. As Sproat (1996) observes, ‘the primary purpose of writing is not phonetic transcription, but the representation of words and morphemes’. Different writing systems represent those words and morphemes through different systems of representation and English uses twenty-six letters derived ultimately from the Roman alphabet. Each spelling is a complex piece of data which can contain more information than just a string of phonemes. English spelling frequently contains morphological and etymological information, connecting spellings to related words within English and/or in the language from which the word was borrowed. Further intermediary levels of phonological information may even be encoded, including syllables, stress and even foot structure, although the recent research on this is too new to have reached any consensus. All of this information is contained within an elaborate set of correspondences mapping from spelling to sound (and back) and much work has been done in recent decades to understand the complexity. Before examining the research in detail, I shall begin with several examples of the complications that arise in the English writing system.
