Dr. Esolen:

Word of the Day: island

English spelling, we know, is tricky, the bane of youngsters and an object of wondering confusion for people who speak German (in which every word is pronounced exactly as it is spelled) and Italian (in which every word is also spelled exactly as it is pronounced). French spelling is, of course, even more bizarre than English, in that the French are allowed to pronounce final consonants only once a week, on Tuesday, and all diphthongs collapse to eau whenever the word in question is the object of a preposition or a dinner order on the Seine.

I’m not an advocate of spelling reform, though, as Noah Webster was, because quite often our odd spellings preserve the precious history of a word, or help to relate that word to others wherein the spelling is more regular. Thus we see the connection between debt and debit, and we owe that b in debt to the pedants of the Renaissance, who reinserted it after it had vanished – for our word comes not directly from Latin but from French, and they’d already lost the sound. Chaucer has it spelled dette. Same thing for our word doubt: we got it from the French, and the b had already been lost; in Chaucer it is doute. But the Renaissance pedants drug it back in, so now we see the relationship between doubt, from French, and indubitable, straight from Latin.

The trouble is that sometimes the pedants got things wrong. That’s the case with our word island. Most people would suppose that island is related to isle, or that isle is just a fancy abbreviation for island. It isn’t so. The words are entirely unrelated.

The word isle comes to us from the medieval French. They were in the process of losing the sound of the s; it is now marked by a circumflex accent, to denote where an s used to be but i’n’t anymore: ile. That word is descended from Latin insula (cf. English insulate). In Italian the n was absorbed into the s, which remained: isola (cf. English isolate). My own name, which ought to be Isolano,
islander, is in the same group.

But the Anglo Saxon word for that crop of land surrounded by water was simply ea. That’s all. When that word grew hard to understand – when the diphthong collapsed into a single vowel – English speakers felt the need to clarify. So an island was called an ea-lond, or, in some dialects, an i-lond, an island-land, so to speak. That explains why in some Middle English texts we see the word ilond or iland. That’s how it ought to be spelled. But the Renaissance pedants guessed – wrongly – that the word was related to insula, and stuck the silent consonant where no consonant, silent or not, had ever been.

Other scholarly mistakes: whole, whore, delight, comptroller, prothonotary, align, could, foreign, limb, climb, rhyme.