The bastard--well, the English language, that is!

It is that time of the academic calendar when one of my tasks is to grade papers. That is also when I am reminded of the stark difference between people like me, who are not "native" English speakers, versus people like my students, for whom English was the first language. It shows up in interesting ways. Here is an example. One student writes about an "imanent" threat. I know the student refers to an "imminent threat", and the student probably even knew the word without knowing how it is spelt. Or, was the student was thinking of "immanent?" Or "eminent?" aaaahhhh!!!! :-)

I, on the other hand, probably knew these words from coming across then while reading something, and then tried to figure out their meanings. I never ran into such problems in Tamil or Sanskrit, or even the three months of German that I did, because in all these languages one pronounces the word the way it is written. That simple. English, as Bernard Shaw famously pointed out with his satire on how to pronounce "ghoti", is awful. Because it is a bloody bastard language.

In writing about a bunch of books on the language itself, Christine Kenneally notes that

Perhaps more than any other tongue, English has been decisively shaped by the series of intense geopolitical events that mark its short but vivid history. In its first 600 years, English was the language of the invaded; later, it became a language of invasion. English began in 449 when marauding Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and Frisians sailed from their homeland (now Denmark, northern Germany, southern Norway, and Sweden) to invade a small island in the North Sea. The tribes settled there, replacing the land's Celtic languages with their own. The word English itself comes from Anglisc, the dialect of the Angles.

So, given the bastradization that has gone on for centuries, and given how English continues to import words from all over the world as it marches into every remote village, is it fair to torture students about spelling?