DT>  I like this example as well.  Having a bit of a linguistics background,
DT>  perhaps you can shed some light on why some of the words we spell break
DT>  the "phonetic" rules.  Why didn't we simply spell cough as couf or cof?
DT>  Why not wimen?  Why not moshun?
DT>  Isn't y a vowel sometimes and even w in at leas one case acts as a
DT>  vowel.
Wow. I'm surprised at this question. You need to take a course or read
a book on Historical Linguistics. As you may know, English is considered
a Germanic Language. Even so, there are many foreign influences on the
language, due to the Roman occupation of England before the Fall of the
Roman Empire. As well, much French influence, due to the fact that the
French crossed the English Channel and did rule parts of England at
certain points in time.
But, add to all of that, the fact that the language is constantly
evolving. One of the most amazing things I learned in my Historical
Linguistics course, was about the Great Vowel Shift. It used to be, in the
English language, that all of our vowels were pronounced (I hope I'm
remembering this correctly) Higher in our mouth. Do you know the difference
between a high vowel (such as the long e) and a low vowel (such as the
long o)? Anyhow, basically all of the vowels in English went through
this transition a few centuries back, such that they were pronounced lower
relative to how they had been pronounced before that transition. I believe
that sometime after this was when the schwa began to become common in
English, so that many vowel sounds that are spelled differently were now
pronounced the same. This would have also affected the way many dipthongs
and glide vowels, such as the y were pronounced.
I hope this begins to give you a bit of an insight into the topic.
My historical linguistics text is across the room on the shelf, but it's
been years since I looked into it!
Sheila
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