Grammar Girl here. I'm in Yon Fogarty, and today I am here with Colin Gory. Colin runs the popular

Dead Language Society newsletter, and he teaches Old English, Latin, and Old Norse online at the

Ancient Language Institute. You could take Old English from him.

And he has a PhD in linguistics.

Colin, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, we are excited to have you here.

You do all sorts of things.

But we have been talking about spelling lately and thinking about it a lot because the spelling

B is coming up. And you have a somewhat contrary opinion, or at least one of your opinions,

is that English spelling isn't all over the place, like a lot of people will say. You say it is

actually optimal. And I just would love to hear more about that. Yeah, there is actually, despite all

appearances to the contrary, a kind of hidden logic in how English spelling works. It's optimal

from a certain point of view. It's not optimal for someone trying to write a word and know how it's

spelled. But that's only one half of the picture.

And we all, even if we are writers professionally, we all do a lot more reading than writing.

And English spelling is tilted in favor of the reader. Oh. How so? Because the, so one way is that all these silent letters that we see, things like, things like the K in night, the W in 2, the N in condemn, this gives us information not just about the pronunciation of the word, of draw their silent.

By definition, they don't tell us about the pronunciation of the word, but they give us information

about what other words that word is related to.

And if, say, we have the word two, that could be three words in English, right?

T-O-T-O-T-O-T-O. Having the silent W, having a

double O in one and a single O in another gives us information that we wouldn't have already had

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