Spelling is ruining the English language
 

Most of us who can read and write English have had to endure a seemingly endless series of lessons consisting of little more than the rote memorization of the spellings of lists of words. Some of these words are so obscure that they are unlikely to be used more than a dozen times in the student's lifetime. Often the meaning of these obscure words isn't even taught to the students, as if the meaning wasn't important, but woe betide the unfortunate child who can't spell them!

Do we really need to subject our children to this monotony? No wonder so many students hate English classes.

The inability to memorize spelling is a source of humiliation for many. Some quite intelligent people cannot spell. It is hardly surprising when one day they learn that "rabbit" is spelt with two b's, and the next they must learn that "habit" is spelt with only one. The reason for the difference is never explained, the unfortunate child is simply expected to remember the spellings of individual words. With inconsistencies like these, is it no wonder that many cannot master spelling?

These otherwise intelligent people are denied many employment opportunities because they don't remember to spell "résumé" with accents on both e's, and spelling is used by lazy employers as a measure of educational standard and competence. To the lazy employer, it doesn't matter if the candidate has impressive qualifications and experience that the employer can check with a little effort; if there's a spelling mistake, the candidate is not considered. And some employers can't spell perfectly either, so the spelling mistake the disqualifies the candidate could well be the employer's.

The inability of some students to learn spelling is considered by many to be a problem, and we then waste huge amounts of money on solutions. We have phonics, whole-word memorization, and other efforts to teach our children to read and write. Yet we consistently ignore the elephant in the room: English spelling is badly in need of reform.

Many people would be appalled and shocked by that idea. "But you can't change the spelling!" they say. "It's the language of Milton, Shakespeare and Keats", they say. This isn't relevant, as modern editions of the works of Shakespeare and other authors are not published in the spellings that those authors themselves used.

Anyone who mentions the name of Shakespeare as a holy incantation against the cause of spelling reform is evidently unaware that on Shakespeare's grave his epitaph uses the spelling "frend" instead of "friend". If the spelling "frend" was good enough for Shakespeare to have it engraved on his tomb in stone, why is it not good enough for us?

Some people oppose the idea of spelling reform because they worry that they would have to learn spelling all over again. This is a more legitimate reason to be wary of spelling reform, but the concern is unfounded. Spelling reforms in other languages take place all the time, generally at intervals of fifty years or so. The old spellings are generally not considered wrong after reform, in that people can still use them if they wish, but they do become deprecated so they can fall out of use. It is usual for spelling reforms to introduce new spellings that are now considered correct. People are free to use whatever spellings they wish. The only material change is that students would be taught the new spellings instead of the old.

Other people do not see any problem with English spelling. Anyone who finds no problem with English spelling has no skills in critical thinking. Here is a short list that shows just a few of the problems of English spelling:

• Why are "habit", "lizard" and "salad" spelt with a single letter after the stressed vowel but "rabbit", "blizzard" and "ballad" spelt with a doubled letter after the stressed vowel?
• Why don't "bomb", "comb" and "tomb" rime?
• Why are the words "island", "doubt", "debt" and "ptarmigan" spelt with silent letters that are not justified by the etymology of those words?
• Why must English have words with multiple pronunciations like "estimate", "house", "lead", "mouth", "read", "use", "wind" and "wound"? Other languages that have regular spelling reforms have no words like these because the reforms systematically eliminate these, but English has accumulate the clutter of over 500 heterophonic homographs.
• Why does "receipt" have a silent "p"? It is related to the word "reception". However, why aren't the words "deceit" and "conceit" spelt with a silent "p" as well? After all, they are linked to "deception" and "conception". For that matter, why does "receipt" have a silent "p" to link it to "reception" when "reception" does not in turn have a silent "i" to link it to "receipt"?

I have asserted that spelling is ruining the English language. It's true. The time wasted in learning all these thousands of obscure spellings is time that is not spent teaching grammar and punctuation. Many kids leave school without knowing that sentences start with capital letters and end in full stops, and some students leave school without even a firm grasp on grammar. Some students leave school without ever studying English literature. English education seems not to care about those things so long as the students can spell.

Requiring students to learn spelling is a false god to which all other learning in English is sacrificed.

To make room for hundreds of hours of spelling classes, we must dumb down the teaching of grammar, punctuation and literature. Thus, spelling reform is not the dumbing down of spelling, as some incorrectly claim, but instead it would be an opportunity to smarten up grammar, punctuation and literature. If spelling could be mastered in three years instead of eight, a lot of additional time would be available in the classroom for the teaching of English Literature from Seuss to Shakespeare. A comprehensive reform of spelling in English could be the best thing for English Literature since the birth of Shakespeare.

Spelling reform of the English language would give students of the future a more balanced education in English that is demonstrably superior to the education we give our children today.

If you don't care about spelling why care about grammar?
I'll use "very unique" if I damn well please and you ain't gonna convince me you won't know what I'm saying. :p

You can use qualifiers with "unique" if you want. I won't stop you. Just don't try it with "pregnant". :headshake

That's fine if your sentence is "me kill tiger" or "me drink gin."

How do you convey the fact that you drank the gin yesterday? Once you're forming tenses, you're doing grammar. You can argue that "I drinked" is logical and conveys the meaning to another English speaker--but you're still dealing with accepted rules of English. You can't unilaterally decide to form the past tense by adding "xx" to the end of each verb--that is, you can't do so and expect other people to understand you. If you can convince everybody you speak with to accept that convention, more power to you. But in that case you've arguably changed the grammar, not discarded the whole concept of grammar.

For that matter, in "me kill tiger," how do you know which is the subject and which is the object? "The subject comes first" may not be the correct answer for every language.

"Grammar" is not just a bunch of musty rules beaten into you by your 4th grade English teacher. It's a common understanding among your group speaking the same language/dialect about how language is structured.

I rather like the idiosyncrasies of English spelling; they inform and honor our language's complex history.

No, "unique" is one of the absolutes that aren't allow a modifier/qualifier.

So is spelling a common understanding, and even very bad grammer can be understood most of the time, that's why we can communicate with people that have little command of English. So why spend more time on Grammar and less on spelling?

What about "not unique"? Doesn't "not" modify "unique" in that phrase?

Not if the spelling of the word tells lies about its origins.

DEBT: This word came into the English language from Norman French, where it was spelt "dette" with not a B anywhere in it. Later on, the hypercorrectionists got a hold of this innocent word, and forced into it a silent b, on the false belief that the word was borrowed directly from the Latin, not French. Although the word does ultimately come from the Latin, it does so by way of French, and thus the spelling should reflect the French origins of the word and not the Latin.

ISLAND: Another word that was mangled by the hypercorrectionists based on a false etymology. In this case, they mangled the word on the false belief that it was related to the Latin word "insula". The word island is actually a Germanic word of long pedigree, with cognates spelt "Eiland" in Dutch and German.

PTARMIGAN: This word is not from Greek roots, and thus has no business whatever having a silent P in front of it. It is of Gaelic derivation where the original word was spelt as "tarmachan". This word has no p at the beginning.

There are other words of this kind that tell lies about their origins. Anyone who advocates the etymological spellings of these and other such words must be made aware that false etymologies do exist.

It's a yes/no absolute and that's OK. One is or isn't unique.

Now if you used a quantifier like "slightly" or "rather", it makes no sense. Something cannot be slightly unique or slightly optimum in much the same way a woman cannot be slightly pregnant.

Don't ask me, I hated English... except in 7th grade when Mr Brown told us about fighting a fire on the roof of a London hospital during the blitz, while his wife was giving birth downstairs, and traveling on a convoy carrying war materials to Murmansk, though U-boat infested waters with ships getting torpedoed right and left, or about writing his book, Folke Wulf. Now that was a good class. :)

I wish I had a copy of that book.

For fuck sake, read some Bill Bryson books, read some poetry, and take a chill pill. Or campaign for Esperanto, at least either approach shows a modicum of appreciation for the beauty of language.

What monotony? Not all students hate English classes. Some of us loved English. Some of us enjoyed learning to spell words and the fact that the rules seemed slightly arcane and esoterical at times made it all the more interesting. I loved it. My youngest niece, who is a lot like me, loves it. It was precisely those early lessons in words that gave me my most abiding passion in life: language, words, their usage, their origins.

You point out the word 'debt' and the fact that the 'b' is a cuckoo in the nest. True enough. But that just makes it more interesting. That is history right there. We carry our history in the words that survive and migrate and change, or that vanish into the distance to be found only in ancient texts.

It's a little like, to my mind, setting aside odd herbs and spices, eschewing the little details like breadcrumbs or nutmeg, and holding up as better, purer, more wholesome, a plain dish of rice and peas. I like herbs and spices, I like the scorched top on a flambed dessert, I like the detail.

Back to children learning their lessons. Unless you have some figures to show that the curent method is resulting in more illiterate than literate children, then I will consider you have a valid point. But since most children do learn and it is a minority who struggle; and since so many children learn from this a love of the English language and books (as can be evidenced partly by the immense popularity of English Literature or Language degrees in universities across the English speaking world), then what you are suggesting is replacing one lot of disillusioned kids who hated English classes, with another. The ones who enjoy the variety and spice of English would hate the classes where they now like them, and those who currently hate classes, might find them fun.


[eta] Well...I don't know about your schooling. But by the time I got to o-level (15/16) those were the sorts of things we were being taught. Those are precisely the kinds of things that our teachers picked up on to catch our interest. In terms of the current education system: a basic understanding of word origins and oddities is tagged to (if I recall aright) either Entry3 or Level1 literacy. That's an equivalent to about an age 10/11 reading age.

What to add, what to add? Oh, nothing!

Also, from now on, I would like the number 5 to replace the number 3. I've never understood the social conventions that numbers are one thing only and should be used correctly. I have developed my own numbers system, some numbers are converted to letters if the previous numbers follow rules that I make up as I go along. There really is no rhyme nor reason to this system, but I expect you to understand what I am saying when I tell you that my new shoes cost 27T41B.

Love English, hate grammar.

BUT - love history of English language.

HATE linguistics and all those fricatives and voiceless stops and all that rot. For speech therapists if you're asking me. Did that dangle?

but even those "hypercorrectionists" are part of the history of the language.

I guess I just never had too much trouble with spelling, although I know people who do. I think it's a right/left brain kind of thing. I even loved grammar! Sentence diagrams . . . (waxes nostalgic)

This issue seems to consume you a little more than most people, eh Kingswood?

I guess that means he's one of those people that can't spell.

To be fair, we Dwellars are an unusually literate bunch, and we seem to get pretty passionate about these language topics.

Three things I loved doing in school: diagramming sentences, geometry proofs, and Punnett squares.

Those things were all like doing puzzles to me. Mr G would give us a difficult extra credit proof in geometry and I couldn't wait to work on it!

Heh...I thought it seemed familiar.

Hey, it works for the expiration dates on groceries. :haha:

**reviewed by** (not authored by) David Brown

Is this your guy?

Or...

**Foreword by E. M. "Winkle" Brown**

Him?

He has an extensive Wikipedia entry and has written several books, and many articles. Perhaps one referenced here is just the ticket.

:)

I re-read the old thread--some good stuff there.

So English has crappy spelling. I can't find too much outrage in my heart over it. On the contrary, in my town where everything is printed out in English and Spanish, I have come to admire English for its compactness, its brevity, its pithiness.

Nope, Jim Brown. He wrote it right after the war, not a technical book really, more about the Folke Wulf company than a particular model. It was in my school library but probably out of print even then('56).

If you're going to suggest we should 'dumb down' english classes in school just because some kids find it difficult and boring, then should we do the same for all the other subjects because other kids find them boring or difficult. Let's look at math as an example. What rules should we start ignoring just because they're difficult or boring? How is that going to help our future engineers produce a structure that isn't going to crumble?

Different kids have different skills, and they have to work harder at some subjects than others. It's just the way it is.

Why bastardise a language that's already been put through the wringer several times already?

Language evolves. Languages evolve. It is the natural course of events, but it's important for kids to learn the rules before they start breaking them otherwise there's nothing but anarchy.

If you really want to know more about why English has such inconsistent spelling, you should read: The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way by Bill Bryson. Though it sounds dry reading, it's actually quite fun to read.

The short version is that "English is the result of Norman soldiers attempting to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids, and is no more legitimate than any of the other results."
— H. Beam Piper

Sure English, especially American English, is rife with idiosyncrasies and odd constructions which must be memorized rather than following set rules. This is an unavoidable result of the natural growth of language; words and phrases are added naturally and without design rather than being formally inserted into the lexicon.

If we wanted a language to be internally consistent then we would need to design one from the ground up. Not only would this new language be off to a poor start since nobody would be proficient in it, but if they finally did then it would be corrupted the first time a new idea or concept arose. A new word or phrase would become recognized among the population and it would not necessarily follow the rules of the language, but it would need to first become popular in order to warrant formal and proper entrance into the language. It is a Catch 22, in order to drive home the point with the point itself. The only way to prevent this issue would be to completely block the entrance of unplanned concepts or ideas, something which is both undesirable and wildly impractical.

I hate rote memorization just as much as the next person, but I have to admit that it is a huge part of what goes on in our daily lives. Luckily I had the opportunity to avoid learning grammar and sentence structure by paying attention in class... I simply read lots of books and "learned through experience."

Actually I like linguistics. I have studied the spelling systems of other languages as well as that of English. Other languages also have rich histories that will reward the interested student who chooses to study them.

Modern Greek is interesting because it has behind it the rich literary legacy of Ancient Greek, yet its rules for pronouncing words from the spellings can fit onto a single page of a dictionary.


A rather big helping of hyperbole and emotive language, but nobody's going to buy it. Why do you think that the world is going to go to hell just because someone suggests that we choose to fix something that's demonstrably in need of repair? In France they recently chose to cut the surplus I from oignon (onion) in a spelling reform (among other changes), and these changes didn't cause the Eiffel Tower to crash to the ground nor cause buildings in Paris to crumble.
Some kids only struggle with spelling because people believe that spellings are immutable and must be learnt no matter how haphazard they are. Yet that is not so for other languages. There is hardly a major language in the world that does not systematically revise its spellings from time to time.

Would you want to end up with a language like Tibetan, where the written language has not been revised for 2000 years and about one-third of the letters in every word are silent or phonologically incorrect?

As for kids having difficulties with reading and spelling, did you know that they need special tests with brain scanners to identify dyslexics among Italian speakers? Italian orthography is regular, and dyslexia is not a disability when the orthography is regular.
More emotive language, and this "wringer" argument would be the better for some elaboration.

Incidentally, Americans spell "bastardise" differently, with a -ize suffix. That came about because Noah Webster, founder of the Webster dictionary, was a spelling reformer who sought to establish American language standards after the American Revolution. Much of the difference between British and American spellings came about due to spelling reforms in America that were not adopted in Britain.
Your assertion that languages evolve is inconsistent with your view that spellings should not be changed. Spellings evolve, too.

As for anarchy, English already has that.

You guessed incorrectly, sorry. It's more that I like linguistics and the more I look at the spelling systems for other languages, the more I feel that we, the custodians of English, could be doing better than we are.

We as English speakers would be better off even if all we did was to allow American spellings in all English-speaking countries. Is it really that wrong to be willing to accept American spellings like "flavor", "sulfur" and "plow" without living in North America?

I absolutely believe that spelling needs to be kept up, because with all the texting going on among our kids, they will grow up illiterate if we don't.

I don't think the world will go to hell if people decide to change the english language to suit themselves. Obviously either it's already gone to hell, or changing it to suit ourselves doesn't have that effect.

France chooses to blow things up left, right and centre. Should the rest of the world do that too?

I guess you should send the queen a note about doing a revision of the english language. My guess is she wont be favourable, but I guess you never know.

I guess we'll just have to wait another 1500 years or so and see what happens to the english language. My guess is there'll be no vowels left at all if the teenagers have anything to do with it.

Aren't we talking about english?

My assertion that languages evolve is not related to my view that spellings should not be changed. One is a fact and the other is my opinion. Whether I like it or not, the english language has changed and will continue to change. I simply believe that the fact that some kids have trouble with the rules of language or find it boring is not a good enough reason to go and change things just to make it easier for them.

But that is happening. Naturally and slowly we are starting to go towards parity in spelling rules. Right now that adds to the confusion, as in most schools (in the UK) both English and American spelling is accepted in students' work; though the English spelling is taught first.

Quite naturally this happening. Look at the word 'gaol'. When I was growing up that was how it was spelt, at school, in newspaper reports, in novels. Gradually, across my childhood that word vanished, to be replaced by 'jail'. There wasn't a big spelling reform , it just happened. For a while both were in usage, then one ceased to be useful and therefore was dropped in all but the most rare cases.

linguistics is, as I studied it, NOT the history of the language but the nature and structure of human speech. "Structure." "Engineering."

Darling, I am not interested in what my tongue is doing unless it involves
someone else's mouth or cock.

Etymology is the study of word origins and evolution, while linguistics covers language evolution. There's a lot of crossover.

English has historically been one of the most flexible and rapidly-evolving languages. It absorbs, adapts, and shifts rapidly to meet the needs of the population which speaks it, and it does so in a remarkably elastic, chameleon manner. It's one of the reasons I love it.

This last paragraph is a non-sequitur. What does that have to do with spelling reform?

I don't know about the Queen, but Prince Charles is a supporter of spelling reform.

You completely missed the point. Dyslexia is a disability only if the orthography is irregular.

When you have similar-looking words like tough, though, through and thorough, with up to four ways of pronouncing the ending depending on one's accent, even though it is not the ending that is changing in these words, is it any wonder that English-speaking dyslexics struggle?

Isn't it a good enough reason to make some changes if by doing so we help people with disabilities? Since you are opposed to any revision to spelling, would you care to tell a dyslexic or the parents of a dyslexic child: "I would love to help you manage your disability, but I oppose the measures that would be needed."

In that case Kingswood, maybe we should publish all books with a selection of multicoloured film screens to place over the print.

There are other ways to diagnose dyslexia beyond reading problems. Dyslexia is a much more complex condition than 'word blindness' as it's often referred to. Dyslexia doesn't just cause problems for the reader because of fixing spelling rules in memory. In fact, that's not really one of the biggest problems to a dyslexic reader at all. It isn't just about the way the brain processes information, at the level of word building. It's also about how the brain processes and organises visual stimuli. Creating a greater degree of uniformity will not in any way help that. Spelling pattenrs cause problems in and of themselves, regardless of complexity, because patterns cause problems.

The dyslexic brain functions slightly differently in some regards to the non-dyslexic brain. What you are suggesting is that, in order to make it easier for people with dyslexia to learn to read, we should change the way we spell. The entire system. Revamped, and made simpler in order that we 'help people with disabilities?'

Maybe we should also outlaw staircases. In fact...perhaps we should cease printing books in their current form altogether and move to a universal braille system. Noone left behind right?

I'm dyslexic. I fail to see how having more regular spelling rules would help stop my brain from insisting on rearranging letter, number, and word orders.

Again, my point was that we're talking about english not any other language.



I think Dana and Tiki covered the reply I would have made to these comments.

In a nutshell, yes it's not fair that some people have reading disabilities for whatever reason, but that's not a reason to change the system for everyone else (who happen to be the vast majority). I was going to suggest that by your reasoning we should modify the way we make cars because then people with dwarfism could drive.

I rely rely dislik pepol hu multe-kwot bak at ya. Pisy pupers.

Maybe that's why he's a prince instead of king.

This too is occuring in Australia - words like gaol, socialise ect. are becoming incorrect (at least, questioned).

I had a conversation with some people recently in regard to textual analysis, and a few of the above issues were discussed. We even hypothesised on the possibility of one day a number system will replace all words of colours. Will the colour dark red be called 19191 internationally one day - and differentiate for all hues. Just how far can we go to simplify language and make it accessable to all people, of all cultures.

I refuse to ever be called "Mom" though. Urgh. Its "Mum's" the word over here!

There are things about English that bother me but spelling isn't one of them.

Stupid spelling rules bother me. Like "i before e except after c." I think I have found more exceptions to this rule than applications of it.

It bothers me that there is no second-person plural pronoun. It bothers me that there is no gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. These are words we need but do not have.

It also bothers me that in English, unlike French for example, the modifier precedes the word instead of following it. We have gotten used to saying things this way but going from general to specific makes infinitely more sense. For example: "While touring the museum, I saw an old, heavy, dusty, broken, German, watch." In order to understand that sentence, I have to hold five adjectives in my head until I get to the end of the sentence to find out that the object is a watch then, one by one, apply the adjectives to form an image of the watch. If the word watch comes first followed by the modifiers, I apply them as they are presented and do not have to move backward through the sentence at the same time I'm moving forward. There are many instances in English where the language structure forces one to present information out of logical order. Why do I need to wait until the end of the sentence to know whether its declarative or inquisitive or exclamatory? Not all questions start with why or how. I run across this a lot reading to my kids. I'm halfway through a sentence before picking up the end punctuation only to realize I read it with the wrong inflection and have to start over.

English has a lot of limitations and using English properly involves, for me at least, making some sacrifices in the efficiency and the accuracy of the thoughts I am trying to convey. However, these are structural deficiencies.

Spelling idiosyncracies, however annoying, do not compromise the effectiveness of the language at all. Hence, I have to disagree with the initial premise of the thread.

And the idea of spelling reform will just make it worse. First of all, what rules do you propose to use to decide how to respell a word? I suspect you are taking for granted the idea that there will not be any controversy in deciding on a uniform and all-encompassing set of rules to apply and that the application of these rules will not create a new set of inefficiencies for the descendants of English to struggle with. And what do you propose we do with the body of written work that exists in what will become "the olde spelling?" A respelling effort will just create more separation between today's English and yesterday's English.

Ironic since it is exactly that separation which is at the root of the problem you are proposing to solve.

Thanks for the book recommendation. I will try to find a copy. How much coverage does the book give to the late Middle English period, especially the Great Vowel Shift and the Chancery Standard?

Well, this tears it.

I crown you :king: of the Geeks. Wear it loud, wear it proud, you nerd.

Yes, this is a silly rule that is a waste of time. The number of words where the sequence -cei- occurs with these letters sounding like "see" aren't that many.

Here's an interesting puzzle - how many words of this kind can we find? My list has 23 such words, derived from these five root words: ceiling, conceit (including conceive etc), deceit (including deceive etc), perceive, receipt (including receive etc). (Hmm. Looking over this list, it seems odd that "perceit" isn't a word.)

So don't waste your time with i before e except after c. You're better off just remembering these five words and their derivatives, then moving on to other spellings.

Best post of the thread. (Not gonna quote the whole thing.)

I do not support large changes to spelling. I am well aware that large changes to spelling would not be acceptable to the general public. This is amply shown by the indignation shown by some posters above, some of whom would rather make personal attacks than refute my more difficult points.

I do not have a particular set of rules in mind because that is something that is a work in progress.

You are incorrect when you believe I feel there won't be any controversy about the best way to decide on the changes. There are many views as to the best approach to spelling reform. These views go all the way from introducing small changes (which I advocate) to extremes such as introducing new alphabets. And some people just like to create new ways of writing English with the same spirit of fun that kids have when making up secret codes.

Your fears about being unable to read older literature are an important concern, but these fears are unfounded. With a modest reform, the familiar shapes of words won't change that much, and the changes would be relatively few. I expect that students would be taught to read the old spellings alongside the new. This is a plausible approach because it takes less time to learn a word with an irregular spelling well enough to read it than it takes to reproduce its spelling faithfully.

Seriously, for fuck's sake, just read a fucking book on the origins of English, STFU, and learn Spanish if it bothers you that badly.

Really, READ A FUCKING BOOK cures 99% of the world's ills. The rest of them are cured by GO THE FUCK OUTSIDE AND TAKE A FUCKING WALK.

Nah, that's all to do with his Mum still breathing...

Ancient.

Sufficient.

There are several more that I'll remember later.

Ah. Someone is pissed. I hope it gets better, TikiSwiti. :)

Here: :flower:

Down here in the South, we have corrected this problem. Y'all should get with the program, already.

We just use 'youse' amongst my lot.

It's written for the layperson, so probably not a lot. It's been years since I read it in its entirety. Hence the "probably".

Actually, yesterday was great. Thanks though!

Ghoti
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1094/...90eb6970_m.jpg
http://bp0.blogger.com/_x1pssTEd3g8/...00-h/ghoti.jpg

Ok, I just checked. Middle English as a whole gets about 45 pages. It does cover the great vowel shift which gets four pages. I don't see "Chancery Standard" in the index. But as I said this is book for general consumption, so it may just not be mentioned by name.

The "I before E except after C" rule is only intended to cover those words where the vowel sound is the same as in BEE. The number of words with this vowel sound are not much more than the five I listed plus derivatives, 23 in all.

The sequence -cie- occurs in about twice as many words. I'll save you time, as I have a word list that I can check quickly. Again, I will list root words only.

ancient, concierge, conscience, deficient, efficient, fancier, financier, glacier, hacienda, intricacies, omniscient, sufficient, prescient, proficient, science, scientist, society, species.

That list includes a variety of vowel sounds. Also in that list are several words where a weak vowel has been assimilated by the preceding consonant and changed the pronunciation of the consonant (ancient, efficient etc).

The Chancery Standard was a language reform that was introduced during the reign of King Henry V in the early 15th century to provide a standardized language for use across all of England by the bureaucracy (called the chancery). When it was introduced, English had several dialect forms and it was sometimes difficult for someone who spoke one dialect to read something written in another. The Chancery Standard was mainly based on the London and East Midland dialects but sometimes used other dialect forms.

One of the most noticeable features of the Chancery Standard that still persists today are the third person pronouns they, them and their. Before the Chancery Standard, the usual form of these pronouns in London English was he, hem and hir. As these could be confused with singular pronouns, the dialect forms from the North of England (where the dialect was heavily influence by Norse immigrants) were selected for the Chancery Standard to clarify written communication.

Or in Klingon: ghotI'