Enough - when enuf is not enauph

A group of protestors paced outside the annual local spelling bee. 

Ruly protestors Source

But they weren't protesting about the spelling bee. Their protest was against spelling itself.

'Simplify English spelling!', they demanded. Their posters read, 'Spelling shuud bee lojical' and 'enuf is enuf!'.

The spelling bee continued unaffected inside, as young students spelled nemesis, apartheid and campanile. Enough wasn't on the list though! 

The protestors eventually went home, having pointed out what we all know: English spelling seems chaotic and inconsistent. 

Why can't it be simpler? Why isn't enough spelled as enuf? And even though it isn't, why does 'Enuf is enuf' make sense anyway? 

Enough of your 'oughs'!

Forum, vol. XXIV No. 2, 1986 (Click to enlarge) Source

Enough is the poster boy for the infamous 'ough' ending in English.¹

The six most common pronunciations of 'ough' are found in though (rhymes with toe), through (rhymes with true), rough (rhymes with scuff), cough (rhymes with off), thought (rhymes with sort), and bough (rhymes with cow). And five more options in less common words make up 11 different ways to say this four letter combination.

How on earth can you predict those words are spelled with 'ough'? Well, you just can't. You have to learn each one by sight.  

It just all seems so weird, and lots of people complain, or protest... or write poetry about how frustrating it is.

Why is English spelling so weird?  

English is the mongrel child of two incompatible parents - the offspring of the union of the Germanic and Latin language families - each of which has different spelling conventions. It has also borrowed words (sometimes with source spelling, sometimes not) from Greek, Gaelic and other languages. 

Because English takes some words and some spelling conventions from each of these languages… we end up with sort of alphabet soup. 

As a result, English spelling is often described - or criticised - as unpredictable and chaotic. 

Source

Just how weird is English spelling?

English has what is called a 'defective script'. This means it has fewer letters than there are spoken sounds, so we can't spell with a one-to-one match of a letter to a sound. We use our 26 letters from the Roman alphabet in multiple combinations to make the roughly 45 sounds of English words, including those sounds from the many non-Latin source languages.

Blogger Ranting Linguist provided a fascinating exploration of the sound-letter² systems of various languages, and (with a lot of caveats) ranks the top five weirdest (i.e. most complex) spelling systems as Uyghur, Burmese, Irish, English, with Japanese crowned the overall 'winner'. 

Yes, English spelling is definitely up there in complexity. 

Source

We used to have lots of clues about how to spell words when Latin and Greek were part of schooling. We could learn to recognise that a word like know came from German and a word like ascertain came from Latin through French. We'd also then know about a word's use, endings and meaning in English. Along the way, we'd learn about the history of English speaking people. 

However, since those languages (and then French and German) have been dropped from education, we've been on a slow steady slide away from learning about English spelling origins (all those Latin roots we used to joke about). We now lack access to a way to understand what seems like chaotic spelling. 

As Ranting Linguist concludes, complex spelling is ... 'a testament to society and language’s ability to evolve and thrive within the infinitely complex interactions of people and peoples, and while that does imply a lot of baggage, I for one am not upset about having all that stuff to cart around.' 

Spelling tells a story of human history: complex and loaded with political and social baggage. 

The story of enough - sounds without letters.

Enough started (around 1300) as the Old English word genog, which was from early Germanic ganog meaning 'sufficient'. Ge- means 'with, together' and nok/nog- means 'to reach, attain'. 

In English, the word initially maintained the Germanic pronunciation of the g's like a guttural h or x (as in the much-mispronounced name of the Dutch artist, Vincent Van Gogh; Dutch also being a Germanic language). Around this time, English writing conventions were being established. Scribes used the Roman alphabet which had no letter to represent these guttural Germanic sounds, so eventually they settled on writing it as gh. Over some time, all the guttural sounds in English either got dropped or became f sounds. The Great Vowel Shift in English through the 1400s also impacted enough and changed the long oh sound to an u sound.   

The spelling of enough tells a long convoluted story. It may yet have a future chapter as enuf. 

English spelling is not really chaotic. It depends on the source language, historical events, and the changes that speakers of English have made over time. We know language constantly changes; this includes spelling.

In fact, English spelling is predictably chaotic and irrational, just like humans. 

It's also the reason that spelling bees exist. 

Spelling bees: promoting America's independence from the British. 

Spelling bees started in the early 1800s in the USA. They are mainly held in countries where English is spoken, as there's little point in a spelling bee in languages with regular spelling! (Interestingly, spelling bees started recently in China with the increasing use of the alphabet instead of characters. And now there is concern that people are forgetting the characters!)

The 'father' of the spelling bee was Noah Webster. In 1786, Webster published a 'speller' (followed by a grammar and a reader) to promote a distinctive American approach to education.  

Source AZ Quotes

Webster was driven by the recent independence of the USA. He wanted to 'rescue' the English language from what he perceived as the bizarre pedantry of the British aristocracy, including their rules for spelling. Webster believed that the people should control the language through popular use. His book, known as the 'Blue-Backed Speller', sold 60 million copies by 1890 and was part of the curriculum for five generations of Americans.

To promote the book and motivate students to learn standardised spelling in 'the American way', local spelling contests were held across the country throughout the 1800s, and in the early 1900s, the first national competition was organised.

Ironically enough, Webster's efforts to standardise spelling served only to create two dominant forms of English spelling - British and American: flavour/flavor, protestor/protester, standardise/standardize, centre/center.   

Adding even more inconsistency. 

And, as we know, Webster didn’t have any success simplifying the spelling of enough.

New rules to make spelling more predictable have never worked. Protesting doesn't help. Neither of these are how language changes. 

Because language is always, as Webster believed, 'controlled' through popular use.

If enough has a future stage as enuf, it will be popular use that makes that happen. And there are enough of us who are quite fond of enough as it is.

Interestingly enough, it's in popular use that enough gets even weirder. Enough might occasionally be spelled enuf, although never enauph, but sometimes enough means anything but sufficient. I’ll try to make sense of the meaning of enough in part 2.

Sounds and letters - the mismatch in English that makes for pain and intrigue. 

The story of the spelling of enough comes down to the mismatch in English between sounds and letters. Instead of a nice one-to-one alignment, English uses letters in all sorts of ways to represent sounds. This mismatch can cause young students and adult English language learners some pain. 

But it also tells the intriguing history of English, and the various social and political actions of humans so they could make sense of things through language. When the letters wouldn't exactly work, they just turned them on their side a bit. 

Sounds (phonology) and letters (orthography): two areas using language to communicate. 

Given the 'defective script' of English, many ask how can you learn the correct spelling? Well, you just do - by practice, correction and interaction. We accommodate this weird product of the fractious marriage of two language systems. It's a social agreement to spell enough as we have inherited it, and it communicates something else to spell it another way. 

Everyone knows spelling is tricky. Enough is a word you just have to learn by sight.

It might even turn up at a primary school spelling bee. 

What we protest about tells us so much about human society 

Funnily enough, there was also a protest at the first national spelling bee³ in the USA in 1908. 

Marie Bolden in the Cleveland Gazette Source

The winner of the spelling bee was Marie Bolden, a thirteen-year-old black girl from Cleveland.

White southern competitors staged a protest about black students from the northern states sharing the stage with them. The organisers persisted and the bee went ahead. Afterward, the superintendent of the southern students was severely reprimanded, and the southern newspapers tripped over themselves to explain how their white students had been beaten by a black girl - 'unsettled by the clash with race',' too far from home' in a 'strange crowd', and the ultimate racist-sexist insult: they were 'distracted by the dusky maid'.  

Marie Bolden kept her title, but black students were not included in national spelling bees again until after the civil rights movement of the 1960s, despite decades of further protests about this exclusion. (This article on black students' participation in the national American spelling bee is an excellent read.)

So, English spelling has long generated contention and protest. 

English spelling tells us so much about our own history: the good enough, the chaotically bad, and the extremely ugly. 

Enuf sed.

(Wait! That's not really enough! Read even more on enough in part 2.)

Footnotes

1. This article only covers English spelling; I don't know any other language well enough to comment.
2. There's another world of complexity with other symbol systems. 
3. The 1908 National Education Association Spelling Bee was a team-based, inter-city spelling bee held on June 29, 1908, at the Hippodrome Theater in Cleveland, Ohio. Predating the 1st Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1925 by seventeen years, this 1908 competition was the first national spelling bee in the United States. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1908_National_Education_Association_Spelling_Bee

Image credits, used under Creative Commons Licences

• Spelling bee protestors: Spelling Society Newsletter http://spellingsociety.org/uploaded_media/bees-media.pdf [Public domain]
• Alphabet soup: https://blogs.gartner.com/alan-duncan/2016/09/21/time-come-text-analytics-financial-services/alphabet-soup/
  
• Noah Webster from A collection of essays and fugitiv writings, 1790, Scholars Facsimiles & Reprint AZ Quotes: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1102241 [Used under terms]
• Marie Bolden: The Cleveland Gazette, 11 July 1908  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marie_Bolden.jpg [Public domain]
• Other images by the author