История английского языка

The alphabetic way of writing was originally based on a phonetic principle: it was designed to give an accurate graphic representation of pronunciation by using letters to indicate sounds. Mod E spelling displays many deviations from this principle. The reasons are to be found in the history of English sounds. OE spelling was phonetic: they attempted to use a separate letter for each distinct sound; the sound values of the letters were for the most part the same as in Latin. Their spellings, however, were not absolutely consistent, for some letters indicated two or more sounds: the letter ‘s’ stood for four different phonemes, c — for two; f, ძ, Þ and s indicated two allophones each (which developed into phonemes later).