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Highly Irregular
Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme, and Other Oddities of the English Language
Arika Okrent
Illustrated by Sean O’Neill. Oxford: University Press,2021 Hardcover. viii+264 pages. ISBN
978-0197539408. £14.99
Reviewed by Laure
Gardelle Université
Grenoble Alpes
This informative and entertaining volume, intended for the general public, is one of a number of books that focus on the quirks of English – and
will no doubt easily find a broad audience. The author’s aim is to show that
“English is [not] just weird. It’s
weird in specific ways for specific reasons”, which find their roots in history.
The title of the book is inspired by the poem “The Chaos,” used by teachers of
English in a number of countries to help their students work on differences in
pronunciation among words with very similar spellings. The volume is divided into six sections (along with a general
introduction and conclusion), with a total of forty short chapters which each
answer one question. Issues range from phonetics, as suggested by the title, to
vocabulary (e.g. Why is it sum total and not total sum? Why are there so many synonyms?), grammar (e.g. I eated all the cookies: why do we have
irregular verbs? Why is it clean-shaven
and not clean-shaved?) and spelling (such
as Asthma, Phlegm and Diarrhoea: why
all the extra letters? Pick a color / colour: can’t we get standardized / standardised?).
The volume is intended as light reading: the section titles have a humorous
touch (from “Blame the French” and “Blame the Printing Press” to “Blame
Ourselves”), there are cartoons on at least every other page, and the style of
writing is voluntarily informal at times (e.g.
“What the heck is going on with this word?” [14]). Each chapter, which is never
longer than seven pages, can be read independently. Beyond this seemingly light approach, the volume is highly informative.
The questions are judiciously grouped together by their cause (e.g. “Blame the
Printing Press”), rather than by a linguist’s learned division into lexicon,
grammar, spelling and phonetics. This both helps the reader easily identify and
remember those common causes, and introduces variety in the areas of language
addressed within each section. As noted by the author, a cover-to-cover reading of the volume further offers
a “deeper story, history of English” with the typical “tension between logic
and habit in language development” [8]. The chapters also introduce a number of
linguistic concepts, without ever being technical. For example, about the
pronunciation of colonel as ‘kernel,’
the author introduces the concept of “dissimilation” – the fact that when there
are very close occurrences of the same sound, such as the two [l]’s in colonel, people often change one of the
instances or drop it –, and the fact that [l] and [r] often get replaced by
each other (hence, at one point, coronel
in French). Among the many explanations that the book provides, readers get an
insight into how competition between words can result in preferences and
specialisation. One example is the adjectives large, big and great, which specialised according to
their original senses (for instance, big
still echoes the idea of vigour, power or intensity in you’re a big girl or a big
argument). These adjectives show the additional influence of fashion at times:
with the industrial revolution, manufacturers preferred large to big for the
biggest size of their products, with the three formats small, medium and large [28]. The volume also gives
accessible insights into the relationship between word origin and
pronunciation. For example, we learn that the reason why the <g> in give does not have the same pronunciation
as in gin is due to Viking influence
(there was no softening of the <g> in Old Norse, contrary to the Old
English pronunciation). The same chapter also gives a glimpse of the complex
relationship between pronunciation and spelling over the centuries. In another chapter, about egging
someone on, the author warns against folk etymology that ignores language
history: the meaning of the verb has nothing to do with eggs. The verb egg, meaning ‘incite,’ was borrowed
from the Scandinavians [57]. About irregular verbs, the author shows that even
though many of them are legacies from old conjugations, some verbs occasionally
underwent the opposite process, such as haved
and maked shifting to had and made [65]. She concludes that “Every act of language use involves a
mix of enforcing old habits, applying rules to new situations, and economizing effort”.
The volume also shows the interference between general rules and
competition among individual words. In particular, the chapter on fast (vs. fastly) and hard (vs. hardly) shows that despite a
generalisation of -ly for adverbs
that came with the advent of grammars and language advice books, the
competition of fastly in the sense ‘firmly
fixed’ and hardly meaning ‘with
difficulty’ and then ‘barely’ eventually prevented the form -ly for fast in the sense ‘quickly’ and hard
‘with force’, after years of competition [68]. As summed up by the author, “when
language changes, it’s never the whole system changing at once. It happens one
piece at a time, and the pieces don’t coordinate” [244]. The volume also shows that some evolutions cannot be explained with
certainty, such as the pronunciation of <gh> in some words such as furlough,
a borrowing from Dutch initially spelt furlof
[50]. The same string of letters reveals that evolutions do not necessarily
abide by a single principle of regularisation or generalised analogy, but that
some form of local regularisation principle might be at play. Gh was probably introduced in ghost (originally gast) by Flemish type-setters at the start of the printing press
era in Britain. This innovation is thought to have led to <gh> being
adopted in ghoul and aghast, creating a semantically related cluster
of spellings (<gh> for scary elements), which could also explain why,
conversely, this innovative <gh> string eventually disappeared from a
number of other words, such as gherle
‘girl’ [125]. Local clusters also explain why an <l> was added to coude to form the modal could: this addition enabled could to pattern with should and would, for which the <l> originated in the present form of
the verbs (shall, will, whereas there is no <l> in can) [132]. The volume will make pleasant reading to all those who are interested in
the history of words and spelling in English. The fact that each question
starts with an example that anchors it in everyday life is a further asset of
the volume. The author makes a constant effort to side with the imagined reader
– slightly too much so perhaps, at times, especially in the core of the
chapters: a remark such as “The vocabulary explosion is not the only thing we
can blame the French for” [87] awkwardly pursues the illusion that without the
Norman conquest, English would have been a better language. Chauvinism might
have been played down at times, as in “Colonel
can be ‘kernel’ if we say so. That’s the stubborn defiance of English.” [18],
or “It’s frankly a little unfair that we somehow got stuck with this spelling
system that creates a whole extra hurdle for people” [48]. Reducing reformers
or those who sought to stabilise the language to “snobs,” although this is
awkwardly hedged down at one point, is probably a little disappointing in a
book that seeks to share an expert’s view of language. The right amount of
scientific knowledge is always difficult to establish, but sometimes a little
more information might have been usefully introduced. In the chapter on phrasal
verbs [226], the author never mentions that a simple reason you cannot say “go
it over” (go over it) is that over is a preposition there, not an adverbial
particle in a phrasal verb. Having said that, both the general public and linguists will learn a lot
from the wealth of issues addressed in the volume, and the eye-catching
cartoons and fun book cover will also appeal to younger readers, which is no
easy feat when dealing with language.
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