The Spelling Society is to hold its centenary conference at Coventry University, and ahead of this, an article in Tuesday’s Guardian quotes the Society’s Secretary, Dr John Gledhill, as saying “In other languages, like Italian and Spanish, if you learn the alphabet, you know how to spell”.

No one can doubt that learning to spell in either Italian or Spanish is easier than mastering the same task in English, but it isn’t as straightforward as Dr Gledhill claims. Take Spanish. Like English, it uses the same letter to represent more than one sound, and more than one letter for the same sound. There are also ’silent’ letters.

C is either a voiceless velar plosive /k/ or a voiceless dental fricative /Ɵ/ (or alveolar fricative, depending on the variety of Spanish being spoken). It depends on the following letter (plosive before consonant or a, o, u; fricative before e, i), e.g. cocina (’kitchen’) /ko’Ɵina/. The velar plosive is also written as QU (before e or i), querer (’to like, love’) /ke’rer/; and the dental/alveolar fricative is written Z before consonant or a, o, u: razón (’reason’) /rra’Ɵon/, bizcocho (’biscuit’) /biƟ’kotʃo/ . That seems clear-cut, but a very few words may be written with Z even before e or i, mostly scientific or borrowed, admittedly, but including zipizape (’row’, ‘rumpus’). There seems no reason for this not to be spelt with initial C other than the symmetry of the two halves of the word.

G is either a voiced velar plosive (or more often its voiced fricative allophone), before consonants or a, o, u; or a voiceless velar fricative /x/ before e or i. But, J is always a voiceless velar fricative, and occurs in some words before e or i: jefe (’chief’, ‘boss’) /’xefe/, and jinete (’horseman) /xi’nete/, to mention two reasonably common words.

H is always silent, except in the spelling -CH- which represents, as in English, a palato-alveolar affricate. So echo (’I throw’) and hecho (’done’) have identical pronunciations.

B and V are always interchangeable – they both represent a voiced bilabial plosive or its more frequent allophone a voiced bilabial fricative [β]

There are also problems with what is written as LL. Depending on the variety of Spanish, this can be a lateral, an approximant, a fricative or an affricate or even a plosive. In all cases apart from the lateral, it can coalesce with what is usually considered to be a semi-vowel: /j/, written either I or Y. Consequently it is not uncommon to see words misspelt here as well.

“Greengrocers’ spellings” are found in Spanish-speaking countries just as we have “greengrocers’ apostrophes” in the UK.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Oxford University Press published three books of names: The Oxford Dictionary of Surnames (Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, 1988); A Dictionary of First Names (Hanks and Hodges, 1990); and A Dictionary of English Place-Names (A.D.Mills, 1998). Then in 2002, OUP decided to reissue all three volumes under a single cover as The Oxford Names Companion. I am naturally disappointed that they did not include a fourth title: The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (G.E.Pointon, 1983), as this would have nicely complemented all three.

Unfortunately, they did not take this opportunity of updating the volumes to make them consistent.

I don’t think I’m unusual in this: when I got my copy of the Companion, I looked up my own name. It’s there, in both the Surnames and the Place-Names sections, but the entries do not correspond.

Surname:

Pointon English: habitation name from a place in Lincs., so called from OE Pohhingtūn ’settlement (OE tūn) associated with Pohha‘, a byname apparently meaning ‘Bag’ (cf. POKE). Var.: Poynton

Place-Name:

Pointon Lincs. Pochinton 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called Pohha’. OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

Poynton Ches. Povinton 1249. ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pofa’.  OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

Poynton Green Shrops. Peventone 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pēofa’. OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

(DB = Domesday Book; * before a name means it is not attested)

So we have three places from which the Pointons/Poyntons may take their name, not one. How can we decide which is the most likely in any particular case? University College London and the National Trust have come to our aid.

There is now a website, http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/, which tracks the distribution of family names in Great Britain in 1881 and 1998.

This gives the absolute frequency of a name, and also its relative frequency (occurrences per million of the population) and ranking (where its frequency stands in relation to all other family names). There is also a map which shows the areas where the name appears most frequently. In both 1881 and 1998 there were heavy concentrations for both spellings in Staffordshire and Cheshire. Allowing for some of the south Staffordshire families having moved there from Shropshire, it seems clear that the Companion has got it wrong in stating categorically that Pointon originates in Lincolnshire – the least likely origin of the three possible ones for the vast majority of Pointons, who live in north Staffordshire and south Cheshire. Hanks and Hodges seem to have been beguiled by the spelling, which is clearly arbitrary, and to have ignored the evidence in their own research for the alternative (Poynton).