English Organized Itself

Places like France and Italy have national academies that oversee the written language of their people and country. English and english speaking countries do not but even so a new study suggests that english has more organization than was originally thought and it ended up organizing itself. This study looked at suffixes going back almost 1,000 years, focusing on four specific suffixes. Those being -ous as in hazardous, -ic as in allergic, -al as in final, and -y as in funny. In ScienceDaily there is a quote by Mark Aronoff, a linguist and Professor at Stony Brook University, that says, " 'English spelling was well on its way to its modern incarnation, and no single group seems to have played a notable role in the movement of English spelling toward greater consistency,' Professor Aronoff. 'We show in this article that the system became gradually more consistent over a period of several hundred years, starting before the advent of printers, orthoepists, or dictionary makers, presumably through the simple interaction of the members of the community of spellers, a sort of self-organizing social network,' he summarized" (paragraph 4). It's interesting to think that by people interacting with other people that over time english became more and more consistent with its spelling and sound usage. These linguists are now attempting to do follow up research on both native english speakers and non-native speakers to see if the pattern is recognizable and to see if it helps in learning the language.

My sources:

Stony Brook University. "The English language organized itself, study reveals." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 10 March 2017. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170310183146.htm

http://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/Berg_Aronoff.pdf