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∵ leothelion ∴ 2025-02-01 ∞ 9'
Previously, I examined the inherent irregularities and complexities of English spelling, comparing it to other writing systems and languages. I also briefly critiqued the illogical nature of English orthography and how changes over time and external influences have shaped it. In this post, I will delve deeper into the history of English spelling and the reasons behind its inconsistencies.
English spelling has caused problems for about as long as there have been words to spell. When the Anglo-Saxons became literate in the 6th century, they borrowed their alphabet from the Romans. However, they realised Roman inventory of sounds did not match three of their sounds. They took three characters from the old runic alphabet to rectify this: w, þ and ð. The first is quite literally a double u represented by the sound ‘w’ as it is pronounced today. The next two represented the two forms of ‘th’: þ (called thorn) and ð (called eth). But everything changed when the fire nation attacked.
The Norman scribes came to England and began grappling with what was to them a wholly foreign tongue. The struggle was real, clearly evident in a myriad of spellings from Domesday Book. Let’s take one small parish in Yorkshire. Hanlith was written as Hagenlith, Malham as Malgham, and Calton as Colton—all of which were probably never used locally. But are these simply cherry-picked examples of carelessness and unfamiliarity? I argue not, since others clearly reflect preferences for Norman orthography. You see, Normans did not hold back when it comes to introducing changes to make English seem more comfortable (to them at least), like replacing the Old English cw with qu. If William the Conquerer had been turned back at Hastings, we would be spelling queen as cwene. This wasn’t the only change. The letters z and g were introduced, and the Old English þ and ð were phased out. The Normans also made sounds like ch and sh more regular, which in Anglo-Saxon could be written in a variety of ways. They also substituted o for u, in words like one and come, introduced ou for words like house and mouse. The problem was, this only made sense for Norman scribes but not necessarily for native speakers of English.
Like everywhere else, lack of central authority for the English language for nearly three centuries meant dialects came about and multiplied. This meant that when the last of the Anglo-Normans were driven out and English words swooped back in to literary practice, people adopted the spellings one region and the pronunciation of another. This is why we use the western England’s spelling for busy and bury but use the London pronunciation ‘bizzy’ and Kentish pronunciation ‘berry’. Similarly, if you’ve ever questioned why one would be pronounced ‘won’ and once could be pronounced ‘wons’, the answer lies in the fact that Southern pronunciations were merged to East Midland spellings. There was a time they were pronounced more like they were spelled, i.e. ‘oon’ and ‘oons’.
Even without the Norman intervention, there’s every reason to believe that English spelling would have been chaotic. This is largely because, for the longest time, the English did not seem to care about the matters of spelling (in)consistency. Of course there were exceptions, like Orrm—a 12th century monk—who called for a more logical phonetic system for spelling. Obviously everyone ignored him. An example of such lack of concern for niceties of spelling can be found in the description of James I where you see two variants of clothes in one sentence:
He was one of a middle stature, more corpulent though in his clothes than in his body,
yet fat enough, his cloathes being ever maid large and easie …
Even more remarkable is A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English Words (1604) by Robert Cawdrey—coined the first ever English dictionary—whose title page spelled words in two ways:
A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English Words
conteyning and teaching the true writing, and vnderstanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons.
Whereby they may the more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, vvhich they shall heare or read in scriptures, sermons, or elswhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues.
Throughout this period, you can find names and words spelled in just about every imaginable way possible. Where, for example, has been recorded as:
wher
whair
wair
wheare
were
whear
People were even more casual about their own names, like Shakespeare. Did you know that at least 80 different spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been found? Among them are Shagspeare, Shakspere, and even Shakestaffe 💀. Shakespeare himself did not spell the name the same way twice in any of his six known signatures and even spelled it two ways in one document—his own will—which he signed Shakspere in one place and Shakspeare in another. Curiously, the one spelling he never used was Shakespeare. One might think that a person’s signature, whether he an Elizabethan playwright or a 21st century influencer, is about the least reliable way of determining how he spells his name. Many people scrawl in their signatures, myself included, and Shakespeare was certainly one of history’s scrawlers.
An odd fact of spelling in this era is that although writing must have been laborious, there was no effort to compress or simplify spellings. In fact, the complete opposite was the case. Cromwell habitually spelled itt for it, nott for not, bee for be, and atte for at. These cumbersome spellings appear in manuscripts right up until the modern period. Surely, people would’ve been more compelled to more compact spellings by writer’s cramp if not by urgency. Before 15th century, it was all possible to tell exactly where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just by examining the spellings. From 1500 onwards, all was chaos. Amidst all this, one prolific invention came to light: the printing press. Printing press brought a desperately-needed uniformity to English spelling. At the same time, it guaranteed t hat we would inherit one of the most absurdly inconsistent spelling systems in the world.
Every person knows that the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. Though, history may have given Gutenberg more credit than he deserved. There’s basis to believe that the first movable type was actually invented by Laurens Janszoon Coster of Haarlem in the Netherlands. It is said that Gutenberg—whom knew little of printing press—learned of the process only when one of Coster’s apprentices ran off to Mainz with some of Coster’s blocks and the became mates. Regardless, what is certain is that the process took off with astonishing speed. Between 1455 and 1500, more than 35,000 books were published in Europe alone. This attracted the attention of an Englishman living in Brugge.
William Caxton (1422–1491) was a rich English businessman based in Brugge—then one of the largest trading cities of Europe. Caxton smelled big money in the printing press business so he set up his own publishing house in Brugge, starting with a translation of Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in 1475. Ironically, this was the oldest publication in English and it was in Flanders not England. Upon retuning to England, he set himself up in the precincts of Westminster Abbey in London and began to issue a tsunami of books of all types—history, philosophy, works of Chaucer and Malory and more. Caxton’s quick and easy success saw many others in England also set up presses in competition.
By 1640, according to Baugh and Cable, there were 20,000 titles (not books) available in Britain. With the rise of printing, there was suddenly a need towards regularised spelling. London spellings became increasingly fixed, though differences in regional vocabularies remained for some time. Alas, just as every Brit must use London English when reading, the English of the capital city became de facto standard for printed materials in the 17th century. Although irregularities persisted for some time, the standardisation was effectively fully settled by 1650.
Unfortunately, this standardisation was happening just at the time when English was undergoing one of those seizures that disturb any language. This meant that in today’s English, we have a body of spellings that very faithfully reflect the pronunciations of people who lived some 400 years ago.
Back in Chaucer’s day, the k in knight was pronounced, as with knee and know. Knight would’ve sounded more like ka-nee-ga-ta, with every consonant pronounced. The g in gnaw and gnat was also pronounced, as with l in alm and folk. In short, the silent letters of most words that just shadows of their former pronunciation. Perhaps, if Caxton had brought the printing press a generation later, English would’ve had fewer illogical spellings like aisle, eight, enough and so on.
But it gets worse (to be continued).