Change A Little, Change A Lot Challenge

An Orthographo­phonetical Puzzle

Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur &
The SpecGram Überlinguistaffen

As Shaw so eloquently states, the English alphabet is hardly fit for purpose. Its alleged rules are, at best, suggestions. This unholy mess we find ourselves in the middle of has a few redeeming qualities. It’s given us spelling bees, for example. Can you imagine a spelling bee in Spanish? Sure, there are a few silent h‘s here and there, and b and v sound the same in most dialects, but that’s nothing compared to the orthographic disaster that is English.

And while using an alphabet that is a few sizes too small for the language trying to fit into it, compounded by unmitigated and unregulated borrowing of unregularized words, accounts for the majority of the worst of the chaos, some of the ridiculousness is inherent to the language. English stress rules, for example, can radically change the phone-by-phone realization of related, derived words. For example, it’s actually on balance a good thing that /ˈfoʊtəˌɡɹæf/ and /fəˈtɑɡɹəfi/ are both spelled photograph(y), as it makes the relationship between the words much clearer. Obviously the initial ph- is an unneeded abomination, but as abominations go, it’s fairly regular.

Halfway between placing the blame on the language and placing it on the alphabet are the regular English plural -(e)s and past tense -ed. On the one hand, it’s nice that they are spelled the same in many cases, making them more recognizable. On the other hand, while their pronunciation is often reasonably predictable, some days a little less orthographic depth would be nice.

With all of this in mind, I challenge you to think of pairs of words whose spelling differs by one letter—either add/subtract a letter, or change a letter—but whose pronunciation differs “the most”. That metric is very subjective along several different axes.

Indefinite articles /eɪ/ and /æn/ differ by one letter and have 0% phonetic overlap, so are they 100% maximally different? Yes, but the pair also only involves three sounds. Back to /ˈfoʊtəˌɡɹæfs/ (pluralizing puts more phones in the mix) and /fəˈtɑɡɹəfi/, they have six vowel differences between them, but they are fairly predictable to an educated native speaker. And the min-maxers out there have already homed in on letter names, like W & H, which are “one letter off” and have wildly differing pronunciations—/ˈdʌbəlju/ and /eɪtʃ/.

And of course proper names—while having some of the least regular or predictable pronunciations and leading to big changes—could be argued to be off-limits. Or, if you enjoy taking a walk on the wild side, maybe they are perfectly acceptable.

Rather than try to definitively say what’s right and what’s wrong, or what’s allowed and what’s not, just play the game, challenge your friends, compare answers, and have a good time!

A list of interesting word pairs has been provided later in this issue, with the help of The SpecGram Überlinguistaffen.

	Rasmus Rask Zigzag Puzzle XX—Lila Rosa Grau
	Change A Little, Change A Lot Challenge—Example Word Pairs—The SpecGram Überlinguistaffen & Ulfheðnar ber Sarkur
	SpecGram Vol CXCV, No 3 Contents