Adjectives, compounds, and words

Abstract

English spelling is, as everyone knows, full of peculiarities. Those peculiarities account for the amusement provided by sentences like (1) and Shaw’s strange notion that ‘fish ’ could be spelt ghoti, as well as the equally absurd claim that York-Los appears as a ‘word ’ in the larger construction the New York-Los Angeles flight. (1) The dough-faced ploughman coughed and hiccoughed his rough way through Scarborough. Linguists take as given the primacy of the spoken word and the derivative nature of written language. We are aware of absurdities like those mentioned above, but see them as being artifacts of the spelling system and dismiss them as being of marginal relevance to the structure of English. Yet at other times we seem to have great difficulty in discarding the idea that English orthography tells us something important about the language. In this paper 1 I should like to discuss one such instance. However misleading English spelling may be on occasions, there is one place

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