Book review: Spellbound by James Essinger

Reader #83 wrote: SPELLBOUND: THE SURPRISING ORIGINS AND ASTONISHING SECRETS OF ENGLISH SPELLING by James Essinger (ISBN-13 978-0-385-34084-7,
ISBN-10 0-385-34084-2) is more a history of the English language
and less an explanation about spelling. Essinger also makes some
mistakes, or rather, has some misunderstandings. He refers to "a
holy book, such as the Christian Bible, the Muslim Koran, or the
Jewish Talmud" (page xxviii). The Talmud is not really a holy
book; it is more a set of annotations to the Torah, which *is* a
holy book. He says of "kosher" that it "has come to mean in
modern English not just food that is prepared according to Jewish
but also, more broadly, anything that is correct, genuine, and
legitimate" (page 26). The only problem is that that is what it
means in Hebrew; one speaks of a "kosher scroll" in a mezuzah,
for example.

And in writing about languages which do not use the Roman
alphabet, Essinger says, "where there is an accepted romanization
system, the writing of a foreign nonalphabetic name is fairly
straighforward. But a strange-looking name in a foreign language
that is written using Roman letters will not have any
standardized way of being written" (page 52). If it is already
in Roman letters, why change it at all?

On page 77 he gives a sample of text written in the International
Phoentic Alphabet (IPA). I found myself thinking how interesting
it looked. Then on page 78 he says, "purely phonetic writing
looks absolutely horrendous, as the physical appearance of
Hamlet's speech in the IPA shows all too well." Well, that
wasn't my reaction at all!

Essinger talks about how the English language became basically a
completely different language by 1500 from what it was in 1400,
and the "Great Vowel Shift", which made what had been pronounced
"Saw it is team to say the shows on the sarm fate noo," to our
present "So it is time to see the shoes on the same feet now."
Again, though, a lot of this is only marginally related to
spelling. Grade: B.