[ELI5] Why have some languages like Spanish kept the pronunciation of the written language so that it can still be read phonetically, while spoken English deviated so much from the original spelling?
In: Culture
A mix of historical change and language attitudes. English spelling was mostly standardised just before a [major series of sound changes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift)happened, and the spelling mostly reflects the pronunciation from before those changes. Spanish hasn’t had really much of anything quite so disruptive happen – it’s been more a long series of much smaller changes. On the attitude side of things, English speakers have made a huge deal out of the concept of ‘spelling things right’, to the point that major change is largely unthinkable at this point – too many people have too strong of feelings about the current spelling system. (This might also be due in part to English’s more major sound changes! It would take a massive reform to update English spelling, and it would have even if the reform had happened in 1600, thanks to the above-mentioned Great Vowel Shift – updating to account for even just that change would require a major change. Spanish on the other hand has largely been able to get by on a rolling series of small tweaks.)
Plus, now English has different standard dialects in different places, and it would be impossible to achieve a Spanish-like level of one(ish)-to-one(ish) letter-to-sound correspondences in all dialects simultaneously without having different spellings per dialect.
For some other examples, compare Tibetan – which has a worse spelling-to-pronunciation correspondence than English does – and Swedish and Norwegian, where Swedish has much less predictable spelling than Norwegian despite them being basically dialects of the same language (from a purely linguistic perspective). Norwegian has gone through a series of language reforms (not confined only to spelling) since Norway’s independence from Denmark in 1814, in part as a way of asserting a separate linguistic identity from Danish; Swedish just hasn’t ever had the same impetus to change. Tibetan went through a drastic change somewhat like English did, where several kinds of previous consonant distinctions got turned into tone distinctions all in one go; I suspect that’s also part of why Tibetan hasn’t been updated.
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