The good news is that most of us are used to them by now.īuy our books at a local store,, or Barnes&. Do you want to improve your English skills and speak more confidently ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant) is the premier English learning app that can. So, you should be able to use them interchangeably, right While they both involve the relaying of information, usually in a verbal sense, they can’t be used interchangeably all the time. Speak and talk are both verbs that have to do with communication. The fact is that this is how the words have come down to us and we’re stuck with them. Talk This one might seem like a no-brainer. But I have to admit that there seems to be no explanation why the two aren’t spelled alike – why “speak” isn’t “speek” or (more likely) why “speech” isn’t “speach.” In general, I’m not in their camp and I’m not a supporter of spelling reform. Over the years, advocates of spelling reform have pointed to “speak” and “speech” as examples of the “viciousness” (as one 19th-century zealot called it) of English spellings. One would think that both words eventually would have ended up with “ea.” But it didn’t happen. Since the 13th century, its spellings have included “speke,” “spek,” “spec,” “speck,” “speike,” “speik,” “speake,” “spake,” and finally “speak.” The vowel sound in “speak,” meanwhile, also had a long and winding journey. But for many years it competed with “speach” and “speache.” The spelling that won out, “speech,” was first used in the 16th century. ![]() Since the 13th century, the OED says, its spellings have included “spaec,” “spec,” “spece,” “spaeche,” “spache,” “spiche,” “speche,” “spieche,” “spech,” “speach,” “speache,” and finally “speech.” ![]() ![]() In fact, the vowel sound in “speech” has at times in the past been spelled with an “a” in the mix. But to get to your question: Why is the identical vowel sound now spelled “ee” in the noun and “ea” in the verb? The “spr-” spellings for both the noun and the verb didn’t survive past the 12th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The verb “speak” was originally sprecan, which was first recorded in 725 (and which has echoes in the modern German sprechen).īoth can be traced to the days before we had writing, “speak” to a Proto-Germanic root reconstructed as sprekanan and “speech” to another Proto-Germanic root, spreakjo. Q: Why is “speak” spelled with “ea” and “speech” with “ee”?Ī: In Old English, the noun “speech” was originally spraec, which was in use before 800.
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