It’s Part 2 of our mega-episode on spelling! This time, we get into some of the notorious mismatches between English spelling and modern English pronunciation. Explaining them takes us all the way back to Phoenician — several times — but maybe, just maybe, some bits of this odd language will make more sense to you when we’re done!

The XYZ Cocktail

Our video on “Spelling”

Christopher Upward & George Davidson, The History of English Spelling (2001)

David Sacks, Letter Perfect (2003)

Kevin Stroud, The History of the Alphabet (audiobook)

NativLang “Thoth’s Pill - an Animated History of Writing”

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The Endless Knot RSS

We’re wading into the messy world of English spelling in this episode — the first of two, since we couldn’t fit all of the ‘quirks’ of the language into one episode. The history of orthography in English is all tangled up with the history of the alphabet, so in this part we trace some of the twists and turns that resulted in our modern script.

The ABC Cocktail