Consonant doubling difficulties explained

My blog Double Trouble http://improvingenglishspelling.blogspot.com/2010/06/double-trouble.html  lists 642 words which disobey or abuse the consonant doubling rule for showing that a stressed vowel is short rather than long, as in ‘diner - dinner’. Because the doubling rule is so frequently broken (miner – mineral, cone – conifer - connect), errors with consonant doubling are the most often committed English spelling mistakes.

The irregularities leave most English-speaking adults confused about why some words have doubled consonants (arrive, arrest, ballad), while many similar ones don’t (arise, around, balance).They use the rule when adding suffixes to short words (fit – fitting, fitted). For the rest, they simply try to remember which words have a doubled consonant, but the memorisation involved is more than the majority of English speakers can cope with.

The troublesome doubling burden in longer words is made even worse by several dozen erratic doublings in the endings of one-syllable words, such as
bad – add, odd – cod,
peg – egg,
if – cliff, sniff, stiff, whiff,
of - off – cough, trough,
cuff, duff, gruff, puff, stuff  - rough, slough, tough;
yes – bless, chess;
this – miss;
us, plus, bus, thus – fuss, puss, truss.

Such doublings are mainly leftovers from the days when printers were in the habit of inserting extra letters willy-nilly, to make texts longer in order to earn more money (e.g. inne anne olde worlde shoppe). This ancient abuse of the alphabetic principle also continues to survive in the endings
–bble,  -ddle,  -ffle,  -eggle,  -ckle,  -pple,  -ttle  and  –zzle
which occur in 87 words (e.g. babble, fiddle, baffle, buckle, apple, battle, puzzle). Such words could all be spelt more simply (e.g. babl, fidl, bafl, bucl, apl, batl, puzl), like ‘and, ant, milk, apt, arm, yarn’. Spelling them as ‘annde, millke’ or ‘arrme’, on the model of ‘middle’ would strike us as demented.

The –le endings with a surplus -e and the pointless consonant doubling before it (a – pp – le) would be less bothersome if they were at least regular. Unfortunately, there are 38 exceptions as well:
Double, treble, trouble, model, nickel,
camel, pommel, pummel,   channel, flannel, funnel, kennel, panel, tunnel,
chapel, couple, triple,
barrel, laurel, quarrel, squirrel,
apostle, bristle, bustle, gristle, hassle, hustle, jostle,
muscle, mussel, rustle, tassel, thistle, trestle, vessel, whistle, wrestle, subtle,   chisel.

Given all the hassle which the unpredictability of consonant doubling creates, it might be tempting to conclude that the practice should simply be dropped. Consonant doubling is, however, part of the wider-ranging uniquely English system of spelling several short and long (or closed and open) vowels, such as ‘nap, nape, nappy’ or ‘hop, hope, hopper’ which I will explain in my next blog.

The irregularity of English consonant doubling was caused mainly by the reverence in which most intellectuals held Latin in the 17th and 18th centuries. English was then still widely regarded as a rather lowly language. Newly imported words from Latin were therefore deemed not needing to conform to the English consonant doubling rule, even if their pronunciation demanded it, although quite a few derivatives from Latin obey the English doubling rule too (offer - profit, billion - bilious, ammonite – amateur).

If it was now decided that the consonant doubling rule can be used with all words to which it is applicable (mellow mellon, ballad sallad, offer proffit ...), this most difficult area of English spelling would cease to be problematic. We could, as H. W. Fowler, the author of the still much-consulted ‘Modern English Usage’ recommended in 1926: “substitute ...for our present chaos...a phonetically consistent method that did not sacrifice the many merits of the old spelling”.