Lisa Klipfel, MA

August 26, 2019

The word of the day yesterday was <kludge>. The definition is “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose.” It is something that kind of works because it’s been jerry-rigged together and who knows when it will fail. Then I read its etymology and realized its pronunciation was not what I thought. It is pronounced /kluːdʒ/, rhyming with <stooge> instead rhyming with <smudge>. Here lies the crux, the thoughts that consumed me over the last few weeks. I read this word aloud according to phonics: k-l-u-dge knowing that typically the vowel right before <dge> is a short vowel. Also as I read it in the phonics way I had no clue as to its meaning. The phonemes didn’t give me semantic information.

This is what happens with our dyslexic students when we teach them with phonics. They learn phonemes, which are important, but there are overlays onto these phonemes that are missing for understanding the words in front of us.

When my initial attempt at reading this word via a phonics approach failed, I investigated further. The two things I was curious about as I started the investigation were the grapheme choice of an initial <k> and the final grapheme <dge>. The investigation I began with was etymological – the story of the word. Where did it come from and how did it get in front of me, in my English world?

The Websters’ Word of the Day article explores the etymology of this word. It was coined by Jackson Granholm in 1962. So, it was a recently invented word, but it didn’t come out of thin air. He chose <kludge> in relation to another word from another language, which is how most of our words develop. He contemplated the German word <klug> having to do with “smart and witty.” He thought the programming solution he created was such when his solution was made from ill-fitting parts. Some might deem it clunky, but he termed the solution a kludge.

So my question about the initial <k> was resolved. It was influenced by German. In English, <k> is the 5th least used letter in the alphabet. If we are going to spell a new word before a consonant, the <c> would be the default. Since the <c> was not chosen, I knew there had to be a reason why it wasn’t. In German, the letter <k> is very common. It is actually their default grapheme, the opposite of what we see in English.

This final <dge> is disturbing, though. I have learned that this final grapheme is used after a single vowel and that if that single vowel pronunciation was a long vowel pronunciation then the ending would be <ge>, for example <huge>. So, why didn’t he spell it <kluge>? There appears to be no explanation for why he chose the <dge> ending instead of the <ge> ending, but both spellings seem to be in use with <kludge> being more the more popular default spelling.

There are lots of word stories where there are “unexpected” spellings that don’t match the etymon. The most popular one is when the <s> was inserted into <island> because they thought it was connected to <isle> but it wasn’t. These occurrences occur in the forming of our written language. It also shows that what scribes find important is not the pronunciation of the word but that the written form be connected to its history. The <s> in <island> was a seemingly important connection at the moment. Language evolves. What happens though is a standard use gets formed, not because the dictionary says so, but because of the people who use and write the language. The word <selfie> settled on the <ie> suffix because that is what got used the most when initially it was written with other spellings such as <selfy>. The common use is what stays in our orthographies for kludge, island, and selfie.

The overlay that I put upon the word <kludge> was etymology. The origin and its story helped to explain its spelling to me that phonics alone could not. Etymology is an overlay that cannot be ignored. Etymology drives the graphemes that are chosen. It defines why there is a <ph> in <photography>. People are taught in school that if the grapheme choice is not the default – then it is “a crazy English word.” If the grapheme choice is not the default, then there is a deeper story to uncover.

The failure of phonics is that it is only focusing on phonemes and ignores this overlay of etymology. Phonics is the kludge of our writing system. It kind of gets us someplace but it can’t explain how the writing system actually works. The tenets of phonics are that our writing system is formed from phonemes alone and that’s all there is. Phonics is an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill the purpose of understanding English written words, the kludge. Phonics can’t explain a lot about the writing system because the writing system is so much more than phonology.

Phonics fails when it asserts to be more powerful than etymology and morphology. Phonics fails when it can’t explain the graphemes used to represent the phonemes. Phonics fails when coarticulation obscures phoneme segmentation. Phonics fails when the schwa is present. Phonics fails to connect the denotation of a word as it explains that words are only comprised of phonemes having no meaning as evidenced by the use of non-sense words…non-sense. Etymology cannot be overlayed onto non-sense, a word with no story, no sense, and no denotation. Phonics is indeed a kludge and it needs to be unassembled and reassembled with all the pieced that truly make up the English writing system which is phonology, etymology, and morphology.

References

Bauer, Ingrid. “5 Peculiarities of the German Alphabet.” ThoughtCo, ThoughtCo, 12 Apr. 2018, www.thoughtco.com/peculiarities-of-the-german-alphabet-1444625.

Jones, Paul Anthony. “40 Killer K-Words To Add To Your Vocabulary.” Mentalfloss, 7 Dec. 2005, mentalfloss.com/article/71874/40-killer-k-words-add-your-vocabulary.

“Word of the Day: Kludge.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, 25 Aug. 2019, www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/kludge-2019-08-25.