ABSTRACT
The English spelling system is not chaotic, but it is complex and opaque because the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is not one-to-one. Because of borrowings, historical changes in English, scribal preferences, and so on, the system is complex. Appendix A shows that the consonant graphemes correspond more regularly with phonemes than do the vowel graphemes. Although the consonant system in spoken English has remained fairly stable for the past centuries, spoken English has had a very unstable vowel system and vowel pronunciation changes have not been refl ected in the spelling. In addition, English tends to borrow words from other languages rather than coining new words. For the reasons just given and others, it is a common idea that the English writing system is hopelessly random. People point to the old remark attributed to George Bernard Shaw that in English the word fi sh could be written ghoti : the gh from laugh , the o from women , and the ti from action . Random correspondences are hard to learn.
