The History of English Spelling

Christopher Upward, George Davidson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444342970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The History of English Spelling

"Fifty years ago, G. H. Vallins contributed a book on spelling to the Language Library. Since then, there have been several major surveys, and new opportunities to explore the history of English words. The time is therefore ripe for a fresh presentation, and this is what George Davidson has done, building on the huge collection of historical data amassed by Christopher Upward, and giving it narrative shape. I have been waiting for a source-book like this for a long time, and I'm delighted that it has found a place in this series."

David Crystal, Language Library series editor

Few languages are riddled with as many spelling inconsistencies and irregularities as English. Why is there such dissonance between the sounds of English and the spelling used to represent them? The answer lies in the history of the language itself. The History of English Spelling reveals the rich and complex history of Modern English spelling, tracing its origins and development from Old English up to the present day. The book provides a highly detailed, letter-by-letter analysis of the Old English basis of Modern English spelling, followed by in-depth coverage of the contributions from French, Latin, Greek and the many other languages that have contributed to current orthography. Upward and Davidson also explore events in the socio-political history of England as the setting for developments in spelling, along with the works of a number of lexicographers (especially Johnson and Webster), and various proposals for spelling reform. The History of English Spelling reveals the richness of the complex and often frustrating alphabetic spelling system used in the English language.

A complementary website with additional research material can be found at www.historyofenglishspelling.info

Chapter 1

Introduction and Overview

English has frequently been criticized for the complexity of its spelling rules and for a lack of system and consistency in the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language and the symbols of the written language. In the Preface we have already noted Jerome K. Jerome’s thoughts on English spelling as a ‘disguise for pronunciation’. Others have made similar criticisms.1 The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, for example, refers to English spelling as a ‘pseudo-historical and anti-educational abomination’; an American linguist, Mario Pei, has described it as ‘the world’s most awesome mess’ and ‘the soul and essence of anarchy’; Mont Follick, a former professor of English who as a British Member of Parliament twice, in 1949 and again in 1952, introduced bills into Parliament advocating the simplification of English spelling, said of our present-day spelling that it is ‘a chaotic concoction of oddities without order or cohesion’; and more recently the Austrian linguist Mario Wandruszka pronounced it to be ‘an insult to human intelligence’. Only slightly gentler in its reproach is Professor Ernest Weekley’s opinion that the spelling of English is, in its relationship to the spoken language, ‘quite crazy’. One could quote many other similar remarks.

A now classic lament on the state of English spelling, written from the viewpoint of a foreign learner, is the poem The Chaos by a Dutchman, Gerard Nolst Trenite, an amusing 274-line (in its final version) catalogue of about 800 English sound–spelling inconsistencies such as verse and worse; oven and woven; Susy, busy, dizzy; how, low, toe; nature, stature, mature; and font, front, wont, want2. Nolst Trenite’s complaint is much the same as Jerome’s: it is not so much the spelling as such that is lamented as the mismatch between spelling and pronunciation, with the consequence that learners of English cannot predict the pronunciation of many words they encounter in writing.

Such opinions are not new. As early as the late 1500s, scholars such as Sir Thomas Smith, John Hart and William Bullokar put forward proposals for reforming English spelling,3 recognizing that, as Hart put it, ‘in the moderne and present maner of writing … there is such confusion and disorder, as it may be accounted rather a kind of ciphring’ that one can learn to decipher only after ‘a long and tedious labour, for that it is unfit and wrong shapen for the proportion of the voice’ (i.e. spelling does not accurately reflect the sounds of speech). A century and a half later, the actor and lexicographer Thomas Sheridan wrote in his General Dictionary of the English Language that:

Such indeed is the state of our written language, that the darkest heio-gliphics [sic], or most difficult cyphers [sic] which the art of man has hitherto invented, were not better calculated to conceal the sentiments of those who used them from all who had not the key, than the state of our spelling is to conceal the true pronunciation of our words, from all except a few well educated natives.4

But do the above remarks constitute a fair assessment of English spelling? Is it really nothing more than a ‘chaotic concoction of oddities’? There are some linguists who have expressed rather more positive judgements on present-day English orthography.5 Geoffrey Sampson, for example, has suggested that ‘our orthography is possibly not the least valuable of the institutions our ancestors have bequeathed to us’. The eminent lexicographer Sir William Craigie, in the preface to his English Spelling, Its Rules and Reasons, pointed out that the impression that ‘English spelling is a hopeless chaos’ is quite false, and Joseph Wright, one-time professor of comparative philology at Oxford University, was of the opinion that ‘English orthography… far from being devoid of law and order…is considerably more systematic than would appear at first sight’ and that one would be quite wrong to think of it as ‘existing by pure convention without rhyme or reason for its being, or method in its madness’. The linguists Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle are famously of the opinion that, in fact, ‘English orthography turns out to be rather close to an optimal system for spelling English’. And in his discussion of the systematization of English orthography in the 17th century, Brengelman affirms that the spelling system that developed during that period ‘is not a collection of random choices from the ungoverned mass of alternatives that were available at the beginning of the century but rather a highly ordered system taking into account phonology, morphology, and etymology and providing rules for spelling the new words that were flooding the English lexicon’.

So how irregular, in fact, is English spelling? While it is very easy to home in on examples such as streak and steak, now and know, blood and stood, here and there, and of course the infamous -OUGH words mentioned in the Preface, the question must also be asked: how typical are such irregularities of English spelling as a whole? Analyses of English vocabulary suggest not nearly as much as the above critics, and others, seem to believe. English spelling is often perfectly phonetic, representing with absolute clarity and consistency the actual sound of many words by appropriate strings of letters. One study in the United States found that in a computer analysis of 17,000 words, 84 per cent were spelled according to a regular pattern and only 3 per cent were so irregular and unpredictable in their spellings that they would have to be individually learned,6 a state of affairs very far from a supposed ‘chaotic concoction of oddities’. One figure that is often quoted is that English spelling is about 75 per cent regular. (The statistics gained from such studies depend, of course, on what is or is not included in the analysis and how it is carried out. Are personal names and place-names to be included in or excluded from the study? And if, for example, a word such as plough is deemed irregular, are plough and ploughs to be counted as one irregular word or two? There is also the question of what should or should not be considered an English word for the purposes of a study of English spelling, a matter to which we will give some consideration below.) What makes English spelling appear to be very irregular is simply that the majority of the 400 or so most irregular words are also among the most frequently used words. It is their frequency, not their number, that creates the impression of great irregularity in English spelling.

We will say no more here about the pros and cons of English spelling, though we will return to the subject again briefly in the final chapter of this book. The main purpose of this History of English Spelling is neither to criticize nor to extol the current state of English spelling, but rather to describe its origins and development, to outline the factors, both linguistic and non-linguistic, that have led to its having the form it has today, and to analyse the complexities of its sound–spelling correspondences. For as Jespersen says,7 referring in this instance to the pronunciation of -OUGH in though, through, plough, cough, enough: ‘However chaotic this may seem, it is possible to a great extent to explain the rise of all these discrepancies between sound and spelling, and thus to give, if not rational, at any rate historical reasons for them.’ What holds true for these five words is equally true for many others in which the Modern English sound–spelling relationships are unsystematic and unpredictable, and in some cases seem to be almost beyond comprehension. To provide historical descriptive explanations for the facts of present-day English spelling is the chief purpose of this book.

The Development of English Spelling: A Brief Introductory Overview

The symbols used in spelling modern English are the 26 letters of the Roman or Latin alphabet as it is currently established for English. (When speaking about English, we can refer to this particular set of letters as the English alphabet, in order to distinguish it from the different sets of Roman letters used in writing other languages, such as the German alphabet or the Spanish alphabet.) As we will see, however, the English alphabet did not always consist of 26 letters.

The alphabet evolved very gradually,8 being applied in various forms in ancient times to languages as different as Greek, Etruscan and Latin. Originally, each letter of the Roman alphabet stood for one (or in the case of x, two) of the speech-sounds of spoken Latin, and when it came to be applied to Old English, the broad sound–spelling relationships of the Roman alphabet were retained as they had applied in Latin; but since Old English contained sounds for which the Roman alphabet provided no letters, a few new letters were introduced from a Germanic alphabet known as the futhark or futhorc. Although there were still more phonemes9 (that is, contrasting speech-sounds such as, for English, /p/ and /b/, /m/ and /n/, /s/ and /∫/) in the Old English sound system than there were individual letters to write them with, over some four centuries preceding the Norman Conquest, the Anglo-Saxons evolved quite a successful system for writing their language down, using a generally regular and predictable system of sound–symbol correspondences....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations and Symbols
• Language Periods Referred to in the Text
• Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview
• Chapter 2: England and English from the Romans to the Vikings
• Chapter 3: The Old English Roots of Modern English Spelling
• Chapter 4: The Decline and Revival of English in the Middle English Period
• Chapter 5: The Franco-Latin Element
• Chapter 6: Some Sound and Spelling Developments in Middle and Modern English
• Chapter 7: The Greek Contribution
• Chapter 8: The Exotic Input
• Chapter 9: Reformers, Lexicographers and the Parting of the Ways
• Glossary of Technical Terms
• Bibliography
• Language and Dialect Index
• Word and Word-Element Index
• General Index