|
|
FCE Exam Simulator |
|
|
|
FCE Exam Simulator |
|
|
LOS EJERCICIOS DE FIRST CERTIFICATE PREFERIDOS POR LOS HISPANOPARLANTES |
|
|
|
|
 |
DISEÑADO EN |
|
60 |
||
| LECCIONES |
|
REGÍSTRATE AQUÍ PARA PARTICIPAR DE ESTE FLAMANTE CURSO ESTRELLA |
|
Multiple-choice gap-filling |
 |
|
ACTIVITY 2 |
|
ENGLISH SPELLING |
|
Why does English spelling have a for being |
 |
|
so difficult? English was first written down when Christian |
|
|
monks came to England in Anglo-Saxon . |
|
|
They used the 23 letters of Latin to write down the sounds |
|
|
of Anglo-Saxon as they heard it. |
|
However, English has a range of basic sounds (over 40) than Latin. |
|
The alphabet was too small, and so combinations of letters were needed to |
|
the different sounds. Inevitably, there were inconsistencies in the way that letters were |
|
combined. |
|
With the Norman invasion of England, the English language was put risk. |
|
English survived, but the spelling of many English words changed to follow French |
|
, and many French words were into the language. The result was |
|
more irregularity. |
|
When the printing press was in the fifteenth century, many early printers of |
|
English texts spoke other first languages. They little effort to respect English |
|
spelling. Although one of the short-term of printing was to produce a |
|
number of variant spellings, in the long term it created fixed spellings. People became |
|
used to seeing words spelt in the same way. Rules were , and dictionaries |
|
were put together which printers and writers could to. |
|
However, spoken English was not fixed and continued to change slowly - just as it still |
|
does now. Letters that were sounded in the Anglo-Saxon period, like the 'k' in 'knife', now |
|
became . Also, the pronunciation of vowels then had little in |
|
with how they sound now, but the way they are spelt hasn't changed. |
|
No , then, that it is often difficult to see the link between sound and spelling. |
|
