English spelling is confusing and chaotic, as any student of English knows all too well. "How can the letters ough spell so many different sounding words," they ask, "like dough, bough, rough, and through?" And what about a word like colonel that clearly contains no / r / , yet pretends it does, and ache with its / k / sound, instead of the chuh sound of arch? And why does four have a / u / while forty doesn't? There are no simple rules for English spelling, but there is an explanation behind its complexity. We have only to look back in history. Over the centuries, the English language has been like a magnet, attracting words from numerous languages. It all started with the Britons, an ancient people living in a part of western Europe that eventually became the British Isles. They spoke a language called Celtic, which was a combination of the early forms of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. When the Britons were conquered by the Romans and later the Germanics tribes, their language was also invaded. The merging of the languages gave birth to Old English (an early form of the Modern English we know), and a Latin alphabet replaced, with a few exceptions, the ancient Germanic alphabet. In the ninth century, the conquering Norsemen from Scandinavia added their pinch of language spice, as did the French in the eleventh century. By the fourteenth century, English, with its mix of at least five languages, had developed into what is called Middle English and had become Britain's official language. At that time, however, its spellings were far from consistent ( 一致的 ) or rational. Many dialects ( 方言 ) had developed over the centuries and sometimes people adopted the spelling used in one part of the country and the pronunciation used in another. For instance, today we use the western English spellings for busy and bury, but give the first the London pronunciation bizzy and the second the Kentish pronunciation berry. Of course, this all happened when English was primarily a spoken language, and only scholars knew how to read and write. Even they appeared to have been quite indifferent to matters of consistency in spelling, and were known to spell the same word several different ways in a single sentence. Even after William Caxton set up English's first printing press in the late fifteenth century, and the written word became available to everyone, standard spelling wasn't considered very important. As a matter of fact, the typesetters ( 排字工人 ) in the 1500s made things even worse by being careless about spelling. If a blank space needed to be filled or a line was too long, they simply changed the spellings of words to make them fit. Moreover, many of the early printers in England were from Germany or Holland and didn't know English very well. If they didn't know the spelling of a word, they made up one! Different printers each had their favorite spellings, so that one word might be spelled five or six different ways, depending on who printed the passage. Throughout this period, names and words appear in many different forms. For instance, where can be found as wher , whair , wair , wheare , were , and so on. People were even very liberal about their names. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare's name have been found, among them Shagspeare , Shaspeare , and even Shakestaffe . Shakespeare himself didn't spell his name the same way in any two of his six known signatures -- he even spelled his name two different ways in his will. By the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, some progress had been made in standardizing spelling due to the work of various scholars. By then, however, English spelling was far from a simple phonetic ( 语音的 ) system. For one thing, word pronunciations had changed too rapidly for a truly phonetic spelling to keep up. Also, English had borrowed from many languages and ended up having far too many sounds (more than forty) for the twenty-six letters in its Roman alphabet. By the time printing houses finally began to agree on standard spellings, many of these written forms were only a shadow of their spoken selves. In other words, spelling and pronunciation sometimes had little in common. Finally in 1775, Samuel Johnson gave English its first great dictionary. His choice of spellings may not have always been the best or the easiest, but the book helped to make the spellings of most English words uniform ( 一贯的 ). Eventually, people became aware of the need for "correct" spelling. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Noah Webster was standardizing American English in his American Dictionary of the English Language and American Spelling Book. Although the British had been complained about the messiness of English spelling for some time, it was the Americans who screamed the loudest. Webster not only favored a simplified, more phonetic spelling system, but also tried to persuade Congress to pass a law making the use of nonstandard spelling a punishable offense. In 1906, the philanthropist ( 慈善家 ) Andrew Carnegie gave $ 250,000 to help establish the Simplified Spelling Board ( 委员会 ). The board quickly issued a list of 300 words that were commonly spelled two ways, such as ax and axe, and called for the simpler of the two. The board helped to gain acceptance for quite a few American spellings, including catalog, dialog, and program. The call for simplied spelling quickly went out of fashion, particularly with the start of World War I and the death of Andrew Carnegie. The movement never died out completely, however. Spelling reform continued to be an ongoing, if less dramatic, progress, as it had been for centuries. Without the benefit of large donations or outside agencies, many words have dropped useless letters. Deposite had lost its / e / , as has fossile. Musick and physick have dropped th eir needless / k / s. As long as the world goes around, language will continue to change. New words will be added; spellings will be altered. But because people are most comfortable with the familiar, it's not likely that we'll ever see a major change in the way most words are spelled. Anyway, what would we do without the challenge of English spelling?