 Hello, this e-lecture is about an often neglected area in linguistics, namely the present-day English orthography. As you may know, the current present-day English orthography in many ways reflects the pronunciation of English of a few centuries ago. Numerous sound changes, most importantly the great vowel shift, led to changes in the phoneme inventory of English, but by and large did not affect the orthography. This led to an orthographical system where the letter sound relationship is sometimes no longer predictable. To get an idea about this lack of correspondence, let us listen to an excerpt of a poem meant to illustrate the chaos of English orthography. The poem will be read by one of our American student assistants by Jennifer Floyd. Here it is. Dear is creature in creation, studying English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse, sounds like corpse, core, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Susie, busy, make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear. Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer. Sword and sword retain and Britain. Mind the latter how it's written. Now I surely will not plague you with such words as vague and ague. But be careful how you speak, say gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak. Woven, oven, how, and low. Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe. Pronunciation, think of psyche, is a paling, stout, and spiky. Won't it make you lose your wits, riding grotes and saying grits? It's a dark abyss or tunnel, strewn with stones like rollock, gunnel. Islington, an isle of white. Housewife, verdict, and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough? Though, through, bow, cough, hawk, sow, tough. Hiccup has a sound of sup. My advice is, give it up. Would you have been able to read it like Jennifer? I wouldn't. Well, despite these irregular sound character correspondences that you've just heard, the spelling of English is fairly well standardised today, and the majority of English words. That is about 90 to 95% of the total vocabulary follow regular patterns as far as their pronunciation and spelling is concerned. Nevertheless, there is alternation, and there are two significant factors that may lead to regular spelling variation. We have the case of what is called morphographic alternation, that is, the change of the orthographical structure of a base form under the influence of affixation, and then, of course, dialectal variation, the variation of spelling across the central varieties of English. Whereas the first type of alternation is fully rule-based, the second concerns the principle different realisations of certain orthographical patterns in the leading varieties of English, in British and in American English. This lecture, however, deals with the rules of morphographic alternation. A number of words involve orthographical or alternatively, you can say, graphemic alternation at morphine boundaries. Their base form may orthographically be changed under the influence of affixation. In fact, there are five such rules. Here they are, continental doubling, E insertion, E deletion, Y to I change, and IE to Y change. These five rules determine the types of graphemic alternation. Let us associate some example with these rules. Here you see some base forms, beg, watch, shake, carry, and die. Now, a case of continental doubling can be found in words such as begged or beggar. An exemplification of E insertion using the base form watch is watches, where an E is inserted before the final S. Shaking is an example of E deletion, as well as shaker, using shake as the base form. And then we have items such as carries, where the final Y of the base form changes to I, and the same applies to carrier. And in dying, we can find an example of an IE to Y change. Let us look at these rules in more detail. Let us start with continental doubling. This rule is straightforward. If a base form ends in a consonant and an affix is added. So this is the context. We have a base form that ends in a consonant. And we add an affix. Now, if this is the case, the consonant will be doubled. However, there is a condition. If the vowel before the consonant, that is this vowel here. If that vowel is stressed and the affix itself starts with a vowel. Here are some examples where the stressed vowels are highlighted. Hit, well, that must be stressed is only one syllable. Refer, the syllable fur is stressed. Swim, must be stressed. It's monosyllabic. We focus and model the first. And not the vowel before the final consonants are in the stressed syllables. So what happens when we add, let's say, ING? Well, in hitting, we have an example of continental doubling. The same applies to referring. In swimming, the consonant must also be doubled. The final consonant, the syllable is stressed. But in focusing, well, here, we only have one consonant and no doubling because it's not the last syllable that is stressed. And the same applies to modeling. In the last two cases, we see that this is the rule. However, the varieties of English, British and American English behave a little bit differently in these two cases. Let us now turn to rule number two, which is referred to as e-insertion or apathesis. This rule involves all those words whose base form ends in a sibilant and whose affix starts with an s. So this is the context. By the way, the term sibilant is used to refer to alveolar and post-alveolar fricatives such as S, Z, S and G, and also to post-alveolar affricates. Well, if you have such a context, then an E is inserted between the base form and the final affix S. However, we have to be careful. We have to include orthographical and also phonological considerations. Let's take two examples to illustrate that. In rows, we have a final sibilant. Here it is. But we do not insert an E here, so this is not done. The reason is quite simple. Rows ends in an orthographical E, which is unheard, which is not pronounced. And it is thus not affected by e-insertion. In box, on the other hand, we clearly have a final syllable, a sibilant, and no further element, so here the E is inserted. Let's take some further examples to illustrate this case. Well, we have here the example of kisses. Clearly, E-insertion. We have buzzes. E-insertion. Watches. Well, again, E-insertion. But in judges, we don't have E-insertion. Sorry, because we have a final orthographical E. And the same applies to rises. Again, a final orthographical E, so no E-insertion in these two cases. Additional examples of E-insertion can be found in base forms ending on orthographical O, such as in do, does, go, goes, or echo, echoes. And after base forms, where we have a final I, an orthographical I, as in cry or carry, which are also subject to another rule, which is referred to as the Y2I change before affixes, such as S. We will talk about this particular rule in a second. First of all, let's outline a third rule, the rule of e-deletion. Now here we're looking at base forms that end in an unpronounced orthographical E. So we're talking about base forms such as lie, move, or large. If such base forms are followed by an affix that starts with a vowel, and here we have the vowels I, E, or A. These are the possible vowels. So we get affixes like A-R, I-N-G, or E-S-T. These are typical affixes involving one of these vowels. Well, if this is the case, then the final E of the base form is dropped. It becomes zero. Well, and we get forms such as liar, moving, or largest. Additional cases involve vocaleic base forms such as ho, or agree. However, only if the affix starts with an E. Here is an example, agreed. Well, in agreed, we have a case of E-deletion because the affix starts with an E. But in agreeing, the rule does not apply. The remaining rules affect the final vowel of the base, and in one case, only concern a handful of items. The first of these two rules is referred to as the Y to I change. And now we are looking at contexts where the final base form element is an orthographical Y. So this is the context, and typical cases are words such as carry or cry. When they are followed by an affix, that does not begin with orthographical I. So any affix, except affix is starting with orthographical I, they change their vowel from Y to I. So we get forms such as carrier and carried, Y to I change, crier and cried, where crier is an artificial construct, but it's the agent of affix ER. But in cases such as carrying or crying, the rule does not apply. But it's not quite as simple as that. What do we do with forms such as played or player? According to our rule, this should come out as play with an I and ER and play with an I before ED. In playing, nothing will happen. So what can we do here? Well, quite simple, we need an additional condition that either says that AY as the final orthographical cluster of the base form is excluded, or we could generalize our rule and say that the penultimate element, the element before the Y in the base form must be a consonant. And that would, of course, exclude play because the penultimate element, the element before the Y is not a consonant. Now here's the last of our five rules, the rule which is called IE to Y change. This is fairly exceptional and it affects only a handful of base forms ending on IE. So we're talking about words such as die and lie. When they are followed by one affix, by one particular affix, by I and G, the result is quite simple, the IE changes to Y. So we get forms such as dying or lying, spelled with a Y. Let's now apply these rules and demonstrate how they work together in a particular system of words in present-day English. Let us take the system of ordinal numbers. How do we spell the ordinal numbers such as fifth, or tenth, or thirteenth, or twentieth, and so on and so forth? Well, the idea is that we take the natural numbers, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. By the way, one, two, and three are missing because here we have irregular ordinal numbers such as first, second, or third. So we're taking these natural numbers, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and then the teen numbers, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, etc., and the teen numbers, twenty, thirty, forty, etc., up to ninety. Now we could state the following. Is it possible to generate the ordinal numbers simply by adding th? Well, in most cases, this works relatively well. It works in cases such as fourth, sixth, seventh, tenth, eleventh, tenth. So in all the teen examples. In the remaining cases, we have to apply some rule. For example, the natural numbers ending on e are subject to e deletion. So this works for fifth, ninth, and twelfth, where five becomes five without an e, nine without an e, twelve without an e. The problem is that in the case of five and twelve, we need an additional rule, which could be stated as follows. If we have a natural number whose base form ends in v before the e, then change this letter to f. So that would be an additional rule that applies to these cases. By the way, in the case of ninth, we don't need this rule because here we don't have a final v. Well, and then we have the y to i rule. Ordinal numbers whose base form ends in y as in twenty and ninety and so on in all these cases are there subject to y to i change. Well, so twenty becomes twenty with an i, ninety with an i. Well, and the next step is quite simple. They're also just like carriers earlier on. They're subject to e insertion. So between the i and the affix that starts with a consonant, we have to insert an e. Well, and the final and only truly exceptional case is the ordinal number eighth, where obviously we have to avoid double t. So this is an exceptional case. With these rules where two of them are simple applications of our morphographic rules, we can predict the spelling of all present day English ordinal numbers. The only peculiarity is the v to f rule in five and twelve. But one thing is for sure, we do not have to learn the spelling of the ordinal numbers by heart. Rather, we have a few rules that determine their spelling. So much for the use of the morphographic rules in present day English. Let's summarize. In this lecture, we have listed the central morphographic rules that affect the orthographical structure of words. These rules are based on an interaction between orthography and phonology and apply when words are changed using the morphological operation of affixation. Maybe that one result of this e-lecture is that you do not have to learn a number of spelling alternations by heart anymore. If this is the outcome of my short e-lecture, wonderful. Thanks for your attention.