Tickets To Where?

England is bursting with examples of how the spoken word and the written word evolve at a different pace.

One of the main and obvious differences between the spoken word and the written word is permanence. This will come up often as we discuss sound and sense, because believe it or not, the ephemeral nature of the spoken word can be a very good thing. If you have ever had a teacher collect a note you were passing in class, you may know what I mean.

As a word is used, the way that people pronounce it changes. Maybe it is hard to say, so they slur it into something easier. Maybe the change is based on a mixing of cultures causing a change of accent. You will recall that in many of the world's languages, the written word is meant to reflect the pronunciation of the spoken word. So, does spelling really change with pronunciation?

Since I am currently living in Norwich (which rhymes with porridge) I can definitively state that the written word is not keeping up. Other examples of deceptively spelled place names in England include: Wymondham (pronounced 'win-dom'), Leicester (pronounced 'les-ter'), and Grosvenor (pronounced 'grove-ner').

Spelling is standardized. We have dictionaries telling us exactly how words are spelled, and there is only one right way to do it. It is one thing for a group of people to subtly pronounce a word differently, until over time, they've left out an entire syllable. It is something else to take a word everyone agrees on the spelling of and start leaving letters out of it. So eventually, the spoken and written word pull apart until they hardly resemble one another at all. And since the written word was based on the spoken word in the first place, its connection with meaning becomes tenuous. When an American tourist asks for train tickets to 'Why-mond-ham' the British rail worker doesn't know where he wants to go.