As all of us know English has 26 letters to represent more than 40 phonemes or distinct sounds. Naturally, this imbalance between the number of graphemes or letters and phonemes or distinct sounds results in one letter representing more than one sound. In addition to this inadequacy, enormous borrowings from French, Latin, Greek and a host of other languages of the world over the years added a lot of inconsistent developments in English spelling. The influence of printers, writers and reformers has added variations to. These historical developments are well discussed in A Survey of English Spelling by Edward Carney, Spell it out by David Crystal and above all A History of English Spelling by Christopher and George Davidson. The first two are application oriented, whereas the last one is development oriented. Hundreds of books are available with an eye on phonics method in teaching English Spelling. Learn to...