The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

Sometimes words were modified in one grammatical circumstance but left untouched in another. That is why we have knife with an f but knives with a v. Other such pairs are half/halves, grass/graze, grief/grieve, calf/calves. Sometimes there was a spelling change as well, as with the second vowel in speech and speak. Sometimes the pronunciation changed, as between bath and bathe and as with the “s” in house becoming a “z” in houses. And sometimes, to the eternal confusion of non-English speakers, these things happened all together, so that we have not only the spelling doublet life/lives but also the pronunciation doublet “līves” and “lĭves” as in “a cat with nine lives lives next door.” Sometimes, too, conflicting regional usages have left us with two forms of the word, such as fox with an f, but vixen with a v, or given us two spellings for words, such as phial and vial. And sometimes, as we shall see later, they left us with some of the most wildly unphonetic spellings of any language in the world.