Just in Time for Fathers Day!

Let’s face it. Your father has always wanted one: a necktie. And not just any necktie, but a necktie with the Deseret Alphabet on it! Heck, what sort of man could possibly resist?

Here, then, is your chance to make your papa proud this Fathers Day. Go to http://www.zazzle.com/jhjenkins, where you’ll have your choice of two (two!) different necktie designs. Each is in fashionable black with green text featuring quotations from 19th century LDS leaders (including the unfathomable Brigham Young himself) encouraging the use of the Deseret Alphabet. The regular tie has nice small type for the Elders Quorum, and the large print tie is perfect for the High Priest in your life.*

Now, to be honest, I haven’t actually seen one of the ties for myself. My experience with Zazzle suggests that they may look truly awful. Don’t worry, though—Zazzle has a thirty-day refund policy. That will give me a chance to try again and see if I can do something better than before.

And, as an extra bonus, two different Deseret Alphabet bumper stickers are also available. Let everyone know of your intellectual superiority in a truly American fashion: by putting it on your car! One bumper sticker challenges other drivers to “Honk if you can read this,” and the other pilfers from a popular Primary** song to tell everyone just how lovely we all know the Deseret Alphabet to be.

I have seen the bumper stickers, and they do look fairly nice though I say who shouldn’t. Even my wife thinks so, and she’s a stickler about this sort of thing.  (Me not saying anything, that is.)

Of course, if you happen to pick up a copy of the QR code t-shirt or the official IRG #37 t-shirt while you’re there—well, I won’t object.***

For the Gentile:

*All Mormon males above the age of twelve are clergy of one variety or another. Almost all adult men are either Elders (if they’re not elderly) or High Priests (if they are). LDS women are relieved to be able to spend at least one hour a week away from the men and are to be found in the appropriately-named “Relief Society.”

**This is the weird meeting your LDS friends used to go to once a week after primary school—at least, if you’re old enough to have gone to primary school before around 1980 and had any LDS friends.

***Yes, I do get a small amount of money from each sale. If you think I’m going to make any real money off of this, well, I have a bridge across the East River you may be interested in purchasing.

John Morris Redux

Third time’s the charm, I suppose.

On Sunday, I was in the vicinity of Cedar City with assorted relations and friends to see the annular solar eclipse. I was determined to finally get the precise location of the John Morris headstone using the Deseret Alphabet. This was my third attempt. The first time, I took some nice pictures but didn’t have my iPhone’s geotagging turned on, so it didn’t help an awful lot. The second time was a quick wooosh past the cemetery on a tour bus and I couldn’t even spot it. Now I was going to do things right.

As we drove past the cemetery, I was riding shotgun and kept my eyes peeled. I spotted it easily enough and we pulled over so that I could get a picture.

The headstone is very readily visible from the road; no other headstones stand between it and the low cemetery wall just a few yards away. It’s almost exactly at the point where 800 North intersects North Main Street.  The latitude and longitude are 37° 41' 25.80" N, 113° 3' 44.40" W. (The altitude is some 1749 m, if that helps.)

The headstone is visible (barely) on Google Maps, and quite visible (but illegible) on Google Street View.

I did not check the Iron Mission State Park visitors center down the road to see if they sell t-shirts, but considering the fact that the last time I checked nobody there even knew that there was such a thing as the Deseret Alphabet, let alone that there was a replica of a 19th century headstone in the Deseret Alphabet to be found a couple of blocks away—well, I have my doubts. 

An Oz. of Prevention is Worth a Lb. of Cure

While working on today’s XKCD, I ran across something I hadn’t given a lot of thought to before. The text of the comic uses the venerable abbreviation, “oz.” How to proceed?

By and large, most unit names one runs across are English in the sense that if they’re written out in full, they’re written without italics: ounce, pound, foot, mile. Even SI units are so treated: gram, meter (or metre in the UK), newton, joule. Some units not at all used in the Anglosphere also have English equivalents (catty, talent).

Abbreviations for all these things are therefore English abbreviations. This is a bit more complicated for SI units, because they don’t strictly speaking have abbreviations. They have symbols, which is why we write "km/s" without any periods. (The English would leave out the periods anyway, but that’s their problem.) You’re supposed to use the symbols regardless of the writing system you’re using, so “kilometer” should always be represented with “km,” and never “k,” “κμ,” or “𐐿𐑋,” let alone “公里,” but that doesn’t seem to stop people.

The flies in the ointment are a small number of very, very old units—units so old that the standard English abbreviations used for them are not derived from the English word. The most widely used of these are the two related to weight: ounce and pound, which are abbreviated to “oz.” (from the old Italian onza) and “lb.” (from the Latin libra).

My general policy with regard to abbreviations has been to respect the language of origin. “Common Era” consists of two English words and so is abbreviated to “𐐗.𐐀.”—I pronounce the word /'irə/, after all, even if /'ɛrə/ is preferred. “Anno Domini,” however one may pronounce it, is Latin, not English. It ends up, therefore, as “A.D.”

Initialisms are just one kind of abbreviation, so I tend to treat them similarly: “HTML” gets turned into “𐐐𐐓𐐣𐐢.” XKCD is a special case because “XKCD” isn’t actually an initialism or abbreviation for anything. It’s just a name made up of four Latin letters. Acronyms present a problem of their own, inasmuch as turning “SCUBA” into “𐐝𐐗𐐊𐐒𐐈” gives a rather different result from turning “scuba” into “𐑅𐐿𐐭𐐺𐐲.” “Scuba” has become a naturalized English word, after all; most people probably don’t know that it originally was an acronym, let alone what it was an acronym for. And then there are things like “SAT,” which could either be “𐐝𐐈𐐓” or “𐐝𐐊𐐓,” depending on whether or not one thinks it’s a word and what one thinks it stands for.

The simple fact is that spoken languages evolve around their written forms. One reason why China has found it impossible to abandon sinograms is that for three thousand years, speakers have modified the way they speak on the assumption that words are written using them. Spoken and written Chinese exist in symbiosis, and neither can change without having an impact on the other.

English, as usual, ups this trend to eleven. Not only has it been stealing words from other languages with careless abandon for centuries and spelling them every which way, but since the mid-2oth century, acronyms have become a major way by which its vocabulary is extended. This even goes for the foreign words we acquire. (I'd give obvious examples, but that would end up involving Godwin’s law.) So we have initialisms which are abbreviations, initialisms which are full words, initialisms which are treated like words but pronounced as if they were abbreviations, camel-case words, and every possible combination of the above. I won’t even get into IM-speak (or r u going 2 insist?) and l33t.

Among the barriers the Deseret Alphabet—as well Shavian et al.—faces in trying to be taken seriously as a writing system, then, is the fact that the language it is intended to write is spoken on the assumption that its being written in a completely different script. If you prefer, significant chunks of spoken English don’t make sense unless you’re using the Latin script for writing.

As for our friends “ounce” and “pound,” I decided that since they’re English words, I should give them English abbreviations: “𐐵𐑌.” and “𐐹𐐼.,” respectively. (“𐐍𐑌.” is a pretty useless abbreviation, of course since the word in full would only have one more letter. It's like abbreviating “June” as “Jun.” It just seems unnecessary.) If the old Italians or ancient Romans object to either abbreviation—well, I’ll cross that bridge if and when I ever come to it.

Font-maker, Font-maker, Make Me a Font

One of my long-term gripes about the Deseret Alphabet is that we seem to be stuck with the letter-forms created in the mid-19th century. Even worse, almost everybody simply recreates the exact glyphs from the font used to print the four books in the 1860’s. Now, the Church commissioned the best font it could afford, but given the state of American typography at the time, the result is somewhat infelicitous.

There are two big gripes with the “standard” shapes of the Deseret Alphabet letters.

Gripe One: There are no ascenders and descenders. It turns out that we don’t really read by looking at word shapes but by actually recognizing letters—but ascenders and descenders are probably a big part of how we distinguish letters when reading. In any event, TYPING IN SOMETHING THAT LOOKS LIKE ALL CAPS FOR ANY LENGTH OF TIME IS RATHER TIRING FOR LATIN-TRAINED READERS.

Gripe Two: The lower-case letters are just smaller versions of the upper-case letters.

Back in the 1990’s, I did two Deseret Alphabet fonts. One (whose glyphs eventually became part of Apple Symbols) uses the exact glyphs from the 1860’s, and the other (which is available if you download Apple’s font tools) was created via an involved process using Metafont and still uses the basic shapes as before.

And as for the real typographers out there, the Hermann Zapfs and Jonathan Hoeflers and their colleagues, there is little interest in making a good-looking Deseret Alphabet font.

A colleague of mine had an excellent idea. Sit a calligrapher down (he suggested my wife), and have them copy the Deseret Alphabet over and over with a steel pen. As they do this repeatedly, they’ll start to change the glyphs in a natural sort of way, and eventually we might have something that actually looks organic. This, after all, is just a compressed version of what happened with the Latin script we all know and love.

My wife, however, does not have the time, and I don’t have any other calligraphers handy, so this past spring I did the next best thing and took the bull by the horns myself.

I’m no artist by any means, but over the years I have developed a certain level of skill in creating glyphs in Font Lab Studio using bits and pieces of other glyphs. I thought I’d try the same here. I therefore started with a freely-available font, Computer Modern Unicode, with as huge a repertoire as I could find. The more glyphs there are with pieces I can use, the better for me. In particular, given the genealogy of the Deseret Alphabet, a full suite of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic glyphs would probably supply me with everything I needed and look reasonably organic.

The results with CMU weren’t entirely satisfactory, so I tried again with a different font, this time DejaVu Sans. The results were somewhat better this time, but still not quite what I’d like. (It’s the font I used for the PDF of Isaac Asimov’s short story “Youth.”) I made a third effort, therefore, with DejaVu Serif, and that seems to be the best of the bunch. It’s not 100% of the way there, however. My wife caught my proofing something I set with it and asked me what alphabet that was. When I said it was the DA, she said, “Oh, I should have known. The letters don’t look like they belong together.”

A couple of months ago, someone on the Deseret Alphabet group over at Yahoo! expressed an interest in seeing the Proclamation on the Family in the Deseret Alphabet, so I whipped up something and put it online. It’s available here.

The general reaction has been fairly positive, so it would be nice to make the font more freely available. Unfortunately, for various complicated reasons, I can’t do that right now. I can, however, describe the steps I used.

I therefore whipped up a quick spreadsheet with all the letters in the basic Deseret Alphabet in both Apple Symbols and the DejaVu Serif-derivative, and some notes as to how I made it. This is also online as a PDF. And while I was at it, I added a waterfall sheet illustrating the font.

Now if only I can finish proofing the book I set with this puppy…

Isaac Asimov in the Deseret Alphabet

I've converted Isaac Asimov's short story "Youth" to the Deseret Alphabet in my usual haphazard way.

The plain text version is available, but at the moment it isn't being shared, so if you want it you'll have to ask first.

A PDF version is available at http://bit.ly/jNMlun. This uses a sans serif Deseret Alphabet font I made using Deja Vu as a starting point. I am trying four experiments with this font:

1) The line through the middle of the 𐐔 is removed, so it looks like a reversed Latin D.

2) The curl on 𐐏 is dropped, so it looks like a regular Latin V.

3) The curlicue inside 𐐃, 𐐍, and 𐐘 is turned into a dot, either inside the letter (for upper-case letters) or above it (for lower-case letters).

4) Some of the lower-case letters have had ascenders or descenders added.

I'm not entirely happy with the font. I think the spacing needs work and some of the lower-case letters were made by scaling upper-case letters, so they look a little thin.

As for the story, it's the only thing by Asimov in the public domain, or so Project Gutenberg thinks. I haven't proofed it yet, so it probably has misspellings galore. I'm going to revise my program to convert text to the Deseret Alphabet to try to get it to do a better job. When I do, I may or may not revise this.

The Tale of the Three Ahs

Once upon a time, there were three Ahs.

One Ah was named 𐐉. She could not be bothered with many of the things her father wanted, so she set off on her own, looking for a spot where she could be happy. In the end, she was lost.

One Ah was named 𐐃. Her fault was that there was naught she wanted from her father, and she also left, looking for a lord who could give her all she wanted. No word ever came back from her.

The third Ah was named 𐐂. She was her father’s favorite and herself wanted no part of her sisters’ unfiliality. Instead, she stayed with him in his cottage. Since she loved the arts, she spent her days creating beautiful things for them both to enjoy; and together they still are, happy and contented.

Enough, say I, is enough.

This whole “ah” business has been gnawing at me, so I decided to try to actually get it straight in my head. To start with, I took the title page of the Book of Mormon and wrote down all the words containing any of the three “ah” letters, 𐐂, 𐐃, and 𐐉. I then looked them up in Oxford New American Dictionary that comes with Mac OS X and Wiktionary to get both American and British pronunciations in IPA.

Let’s go through them in reverse alphabetical order. For each letter, I’ll list all the words, then their American pronunciations (Wiktionary first) and their British pronunciations (again, Wiktionary first). For some words, the dictionaries only gave the pronunciations of their roots.

𐐤𐐉𐐓 /nɑt/ |nɑt| /nɒt/ |nɒt|

𐐉𐐚 /ʌv/ |əv| |ə| /ɒv/ |ɒv|

𐐘𐐉𐐔 /ɡɑːd/ |gɑd| /ɡɒd/ |gɒd|

𐐉𐐙 /ɑf/ |ɑf| /ɒf/ |ɒf|

𐐝𐐑𐐉𐐓𐐢𐐇𐐝 /spɑt/ |ˈspɑtləs| /spɒt/ |spɒt|

These words are on the bother end of the bother-father merger. This merger hasn’t taken place in all varieties of British English but has throughout almost all of North America, so the British pronunciations give the intended sound, ɒ.

𐐃𐐢𐐝𐐄 /ˈɔl.soʊ/ |ˈɔlsoʊ| /ˈɔːl.səʊ/ |ˈɔːlsəʊ|

𐐢𐐃𐐡𐐔 /lɔːd/ |lɔrd| /lɔːd/ |lɔːd|

𐐙𐐃𐐡 /fɔɹ/ |fɔ(ə)r| /fɔː(ɹ)/ |fɔː|

𐐃𐐢 /ɔl/ |ɔl| /ɔːl/ |ɔːl|

𐐙𐐃𐐢𐐓𐐝 /fɔlt/ |fɔlt| /fɔːlt/ |fɔːlt|

These words are on the caught end of the cot-caught merger. This merger isn’t considered “standard” in American English, although it has taken place in Utah English, so all the dictionaries agree on what it should sound like, namely ɔ. It’s just not the way I pronounce it.

𐐂𐐡 /ɑɹ/ |ɑr| /ɑː(ɹ)/ |ɑː|

𐐙𐐂𐐛𐐇𐐡𐐞 (NA) |ˈfɑðər| /ˈfɑː.ðə(ɹ)/ |ˈfɑːðə|

𐐗𐐂𐐝𐐓 /kæst/ |kæst| /kɑːst/ |kɑːst|

𐐑𐐂𐐡𐐓 /pɑɹt/ |pɑrt| /pɑːt/ |pɑːt|

This vowel is on the winning wide of both mergers, father and cot, and is the only form of “ah” I can pronounce without a conscious effort. It’s ɑ.

(I actually got a bit mixed up when first I tried to coordinate this data with what Wikipedia has to say about the two mergers, but Ken Beesley corrected me.)

This is actually bad news, largely because I somehow got the impression that the vowel of cot was the more O-ish ɔ, and because I somehow got the impression that it was written with 𐐉. As a result, there are entries in the Deseret Alphabet wiki for 𐐝𐐹𐐱𐐿 and 𐐌𐑆𐐲𐐿 𐐈𐑆𐐲𐑋𐐱𐑂, even though my actual pronunciations are 𐐝𐐹𐐪𐐿 and 𐐈𐑆𐐲𐑋𐐪𐑂, respectively. As for how they’re “correctly” spelled in the Deseret Alphabet—well, I’m giving up. A cobbler should stick to his last. From now on, in any wiki entry I work on or any other DA text I compose, every “ah” is 𐐂 unless I know better, having learned the distinct pronunciation from a dictionary or other unimpeachable source.

(As for our Vulcan and biochemist friends, I don’t know who would be the ultimate authority on how to pronounce “Spock,” but it should by rights either be Gene Roddenberry—who is dead and therefore unavailable—or Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy is from Boston, where they preserve all three vowels, so if one listens very closely, one could probably figure out how “Spock” should be written.

(Asimov was a Russian Jew raised in Brooklyn, and New York is another one of the places that preserves all three “ah” sounds—albeit, that may not include Brooklyn. He is known to have told people that, to pronounce his name, say “has him off” but drop the h's. I could use that to argue that the final vowel was indeed 𐐉, but I think I’m not going to press my luck. First of all, I have audio recordings of the man pronouncing his own name, and he ended it with a /v/, not an /f/. Secondly, he also rhymed it with “stars above” and “mazel tov.” The best thing would be to have someone who can really hear the differences listen to the recordings and figure out which vowel Asimov actually used.)

Take the Name Challenge

I was thinking last night about the issue of writing with a phonetic alphabet being not quite as simple as one would think, and I came up with a good way of illustrating this. Take the name challenge—try to write you own name in the Deseret Alphabet. For example, let’s try my name.

John. Starting off with my given name, I’m already in trouble. I speak a dialect of English which has undergone what’s called the caught-cot merger, and that means that whereas some dialects of English distinguish |ɑ| and |ɔ| (that’s 𐐉 and 𐐂, respectively, in the Deseret Alphabet—or is it the other way around?), mine doesn’t. I can hear the distinction if I’m listening for it, and I can make it if I want to, but those are both conscious processes. Since I grew up not making the distinction, I can’t off-hand predict with anything near 100% certainty which one will occur in any given word.

So with the name John, I don’t know whether to spell it 𐐖𐐱𐑌 or 𐐖𐐪𐑌. I’ve been spelling it 𐐖𐐱𐑌, but I have to check either in a dictionary or in some of the extent materials in the Deseret Alphabet (in this case the Deseret Third Reader) to be sure. Fortunately, it says 𐐖𐐱𐑌 and I happen to have done it correctly.

Now, a child growing up with the Deseret Alphabet wouldn’t have this problem. Even if they spoke Utah English as I do, they would simply learn that John is spelled with a 𐐉 and not a 𐐂, the same way that French kids grow up knowing that chat is a boy cat and chatte is a girl cat, or, for that matter, the way an English-speaking kid grows up knowing that John usually has a silent h, but since it can be spelled Jon, you have to learn for any particular John you meet which one it is. Since John is short and common, kids would probably pick up on the proper Deseret Alphabet spelling without even realizing it.

At the same time, this does mean that at some point a lot of the Deseret Alphabet generation will come home and complain to their parents, “I thought we were supposed to spell everything the way we pronounce it? So what’s with all this crap about 𐐉, 𐐂 and 𐐃?”

Howard. Even worse. To start with, is that 'w' there simply as part of the “ow” vowel we start with, or do I actually pronounce a |w| sound? Am I saying “how-ard” or “how-ward”? It sounds to me like there’s a |w| sound in there, that my mouth isn’t just pretending to make a |w| on its way from the one vowel to the other without actually doing so, but I’m not entirely sure.

As for the second vowel, it precedes an |r|, and that always screws up vowels. Since it’s written with an ‘a’, you would assume that there either is or was an “ah” sound there—I’m guessing 𐐪, but I’m not sure. Still, it’s an unstressed vowel, and those tend to turn into schwas, and when I sound the word out, it sounds a bit more schwa-y than not. I’ll go therefore with 𐐐𐐵𐐶𐐲𐑉𐐼, but again I don’t know without checking a dictionary. “Howard” isn’t any of the published Deseret Alphabet materials so far as I know, but a modern dictionary says |ˈhaʊərd|, which means I’m wrong and it should have been 𐐐𐐵𐐲𐑉𐐼.

Jenkins. There are two ways to pronounce my surname, my way and the wrong way. My way has a long vowel in it, |e|. The wrong way has a short vowel in it, |ɛ|.

The ‘n’ is a bit problematic. The problem is that it precedes a ‘k’, and in English, |n| tends to turn into |ŋ| when this happens. The tongue is in the same position for |ŋ| and |k|, you see, and so it tends to move into that position a bit early when it’s working with an |n| in order to get ready for the |k|.

Historically, the name is Jen-kins or Jan-kins, “Jen/Jan” being one of the many forms of “John” out there and “-kin” or “-kins” being a diminutive (think lamby-kins, and yes, that means my name is “John Johnny”). That means that it was definitely an |n| sound way back when and I do hear people pronounce “Jenkins” with a very distinct |n|. In listening to what I say, however, and paying attention to what my tongue is doing, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a |ŋ|.

(This, by the way, is a major defect of standard English spelling and one place where the Deseret Alphabet has a very distinct advantage. The DA may be missing a letter for schwa, but it has letters for both |ŋ| and |ʒ|, whereas the standard English alphabet has no consistent way of spelling them. |ŋ| is usually “ng”, but sometimes, as here, it isn’t indicated in the spelling at all.)

As for the second vowel, it sounds like a |ɪ| to me, but since it’s unstressed that may be another schwa. The ‘i’ indicates that it was historically |ɪ|-ish, but that’s not a big help. Anyway, I’m going with |ɪ|. The net result here is 𐐖𐐩𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆.

And I’m wrong again. The Mac OS X dictionary application says |ˈʤɛŋkənz|, which would be 𐐖𐐯𐑍𐐿𐐲𐑌𐑆. Wikipedia says “Jen-kins & Jon-kins”, which is no help at all (except they think it’s an |n|, apparently), and Dictionary.com says |ˈdʒɛŋkɪnz|, which would still be 𐐖𐐯𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆, not 𐐖𐐩𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆. All this unanimity on the first vowel surprises me, because it very much sounds like an |e| when I say it. (It goes without saying that the extant Deseret Alphabet publications are no help.)

Unlike John, though, Jenkins isn’t exactly common. It’s not rare, of course, but it’s rare enough that a child may very well go all the way through school never learning from the school the proper spelling in the Deseret Alphabet. They would simply spell it the way the adults do, and as an adult, I would have said 𐐖𐐩𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆 without really thinking and certainly without consulting a dictionary. I think the net result would be that multiple spellings would come into use, and some people would be 𐐖𐐩𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆, some would be 𐐖𐐯𐑍𐐿𐐲𐑌𐑆, and some would be 𐐖𐐯𐑍𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆. (And some would be 𐐖𐐯𐑌𐐿𐐮𐑌𐑆, too.) It’s not unlike the fact that we have Jenkins and Jenkin (or John and Jon). Once this starts showing up on legal records, the spellings tend to get frozen even if in retrospect they’re wrong.

(To name an example near and dear to my heart, the late writer Isaac Asimov had the spelling of his surname fixed when his family moved to the US from the Soviet Union in 1923. His father didn’t know English at the time and so did the best he could coming up with the spelling—but the name was, in practice, pronounced with a final |f|, not a final |v|, and the spelling was incorrect. By the time anybody realized this, though, it was too late.)

Now names are notoriously tricky things. Since they’re part of people’s identieis, people get very possessive about them and do insist on certain spellings and pronunciations, even when they don’t really make any sense. I’m willing to bet that had the DA gone into widespread use, we would have pretty quickly been seeing some boys named 𐐖𐐪𐑌 who would get as upset if you spelled it 𐐖𐐱𐑌 as I do if you spell my first name “Jon.”

Realistically, too, my name is unusually fraught with difficulties. My wife’s maiden name, for example, is very unambiguously 𐐐𐐴𐐼𐐨 𐐤𐐯𐑊𐑅𐐲𐑌 in the Deseret Alphabet, and our youngest clearly has 𐐄𐑊𐐮𐑂𐐨𐐲 𐐡𐐬𐑆 for her given names. Our other kids, though—Mary Catherine and Joseph Richard—well, of the four names there, “Joseph” is the only one that’s entirely straightforward.

And I’m not going to deny that standard English spelling is any better, because it is genuinely worse. Not only do you have John-Jon and the like, but you have people who deliberately come up with cutsie spellings like Shellee or you have people with legitimate but rare names, like my sister Maren who has spent her life trying to explain to people that it rhymes with “Karen” and isn’t some bizarre variant of Maureen. (In Deseret Alphabet-land, it would only be a matter of time before you found girls called 𐐟𐐯𐑊𐐨𐐨. That’s just the way people are, more’s the pity.)

My point, however, is something quite different. The Deseret Alphabet spellings would be considerably more straightforward than standard English spellings are, there’s no doubt of it. Nonetheless, even with a nominally “phonetic” alphabet, coming up with a standard, agreed-upon spelling for a word may be more complicated than one would think.