First written word in english

The History of English

Linguistics/English 395,
Spring 2009

Prof. Suzanne Kemmer
Rice University
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Spelling and Standardization in English: Historical Overview

Writing systems and alphabets in England

English has an alphabetic writing system based on the Roman alphabet
that was brought to Anglo-Saxon England by Christian missionaries
and church officials in the 600s. An earlier Germanic writing system
called runes, also alphabetic and originating ultimately from the same
source as the Roman alphabet, was used for more limited purposes
(largely incantations, curses, and a few poems) when the tribes were
still on the continent and also after their migration to Britain,
up until Christianization.

Alphabetic writing systems are based on the principle of representing
spoken sound segments, specifically those at the level of consonants
and vowels, by written characters, ideally one for each sound
segment. Crucial elements of the sound stream of a message are thus
‘captured’ by a linear sequence of marks that can be «sounded out» to
recapture the message by means of its sounds. The entire sound stream
is not captured, but enough of it is to provide a prompt for lexical
recognition. (Other kinds of writing systems are based on written
representation of other linguistic units such as syllables, words, or
some mix of these.)

The Roman alphabet and Anglo-Saxon

The Roman alphabet, being designed for a language with a very different
phonological system, was never perfectly adapted for writing English
even when first used to represent Anglo-Saxon. The first monks
writing English using Roman letters soon
added new characters to handle the extra sounds. For example, the
front low vowel /æ/ of Anglo-Saxon was represented by a ligature of a
and e, forming a single written character called ash.
They also added a
few runic characters to the alphabet
to represent consonant sounds not
found in Latin or its Romance descendents, such as the fricatives
thorn þ, eth ð, and yogh ȝ (a voiced palatal or velar
fricative, represented by a character that looks
somewhat like a 3). Later on in the medieval
period these runic characters
were replaced with digraphs, two-letter symbols such
as th, sh, and gh. The letters in these digraphs do not have their usual
values, but are used as a complex to indicate single sounds.

Writing in Anglo-Saxon: Variation and incipient standardization

Norms for writing words consistently with an alphabetic character set
are collectively called orthography. Consistency in writing was never
absolute in Anglo-Saxon because the whole system was new and norms for
writing words in a consistent way took time to develop. It is not easy
for writers to remember a single orthographic representation, called a spelling,
for a word; yet this is what is required for standardization, unless
there is a perfect one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and
graphemes, which is an ideal rarely reached with alphabetic systems.
Writers seem to prefer to produce
written forms they have seen before for specific words, even if there
is not a good match between written characters and sounds.

From the reader’s perspective, we might think that simply pronouncing
a word based on the prompts provided by the graphemes would be enough
to allow a reader to produce a spoken message matching the written
form. Yet it turns out that producing the sound of an utterance by
reading it off from the graphemes is no simple cognitive task.
Getting a pronunciation out of alphabetic writing requires people to
analyze the sound string down to the level of component sounds. Yet
this type of phonemic analysis is apparently not an obvious or natural
one for humans; it needs to be taught intensively before it can be
done fairly automatically and that is one reason why acquisition of
literacy at an early age is stressed in cultures with alphabetic
writing. It takes a lot of practice to reliably decode messages from
alphabetic writing. Some of those who try to learn to read alphabetic
writing never master it because they can’t separate the speech string
into individual segments, which are clusters of vocal gestures in
consonants and vowels, in this way. Syllables apparently are a more
natural unit for humans to perceive and hence code (write) and decode
(read) by means of marks on a page.

Reading is also apparently swifter the more familiar the form of the
written words are. A word in a spelling the reader has seen before is
easier and quicker to recognize than one not seen before. Also reading
is apparently quicker the less variation there is in the forms of
words. (But there is much individual variation on this last point.)

The manuscripts were apparently normally read aloud, rather than
internally as most reading is now done. That means the process of
reading was
slow enough that variation in the visual forms did not seriously detract from
production of the sounds as prompted by the written characters. With
reading ‘to oneself’, the process is potentially swifter once the
reader has mastered the system; but variation can then slow it down.

If there was ever consistency at the start of the use of the Roman
alphabet for representing Anglo-Saxon, it began to lessen immediately.
The novelty of the alphabetic system as a technology, the lack of
fixed norms for written representations, and the changes over
time of the language were
all forces that led to greater divergence of the
written forms from the spoken string. Add to that dialect variation:
Some of
the scribes came from outside Wessex, and even when they tried to
write so as to approximate Wessex sounds, their own local
pronunciations often affected the characters they wrote.
Scholars observe the dialect features of individual manuscripts to
gain clues about where the manuscript was composed and/or copied.

There was at that time no strong countervailing force leading toward
standardization, i.e reduction of variation, such as would come
later. Spellings are so variable that to lessen the difficulties
modern readers may have, Old English texts are generally «normalized»,
or printed in accordance with what scholars think is a good
representative form for each word.

Manuscripts were produced in fairly large numbers by monks copying originals
using quill pens, ink, and, as the writing surface, prepared sheepskins (parchment) or the
much more expensive and high quality calfskins
(vellum).
The physical technology of this system hardly changed for 800
years. During that time some norms arose for spelling (incipient
standardized spellings, although still by our standards highly
variable), but the sounds of the language were changing faster. As
usual with written languages, norms for writing lagged behind those
for pronunciation, thus providing another source of divergence of the
written form from the spoken.

Although the royal court was in Winchester, other regional centers of
government and/or learning arose or continued developing, such as
York, Peterborough, Jarrow — and at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period,
just before the conquest, London. The first three of these centers
tended to have their own orthographic norms based on Northern
pronunciations. Thus there was no single center for the development of
orthographic norms, although the royal court in the south exerted a
powerful force for normalization.

The period after the conquest: Spelling during the Middle English period

The Norman Conquest and its aftermath changed the entire social and
governmental structure. It also affected spelling greatly, for various
reasons. The most obvious is that the use of English in written
documents was greatly reduced. English was no longer the dominant
language for law and government, so the tendency toward
standardization for Anglo-Saxon writing was essentially stopped in
its tracks. Some English was still written, but far less than
before. With no schools and monasteries teaching ways of writing Old
English, any incipient norms were swept away and people hardly
literate in the language just tried to
spell as the words sounded, with predictably irregular results.

Second, after the conquest many scribes were French or French-trained.
Their norms for representing sounds were different in many
respects. The letter c, for example, was used in French to spell an
/s/ sound in many loanwords of Latin origin; the letter c in the
Roman writing system represented a /k/, but a sound change in Latin
turned /k/ into /s/ before front non-low vowels. (Thus Latin
civitas /kiwitas/ evolved into French cité, from
where we get our word city.) From many instances like this
one, the use of a single letter c to represent the radically different
sounds /k/ and /s/ came into the English spelling system
(and persists to this day). The /s/ variant developed by assimilation
and weaking of the original /k/ in particular contents. A similar
sound change when Latin was changing into the Romance languages gave
rise to the use of the letter g for both a /g/ sound and a /dȝ/
sound, as in goat vs. gesture. Like the split of the
early /k/ sound into /k/ and /s/, this split of Latin /g/ was induced
by assimilation of the /g/ before front non-low vowels, in which the
sound took on the frontness of the following vowel. And like the
split of /k/, the orthographic mismatch of the letter /g/ and the
sounds it stood for was imported into English via the introduction
during Middle English of
large numbers of French loanwords with the new /dȝ/ sound in
them.

Third, the conquest brought about a change
in the dialect taken as the standard.
The seat of the royal court and government moved to London
after the conquest. (Edward the Confessor built his beloved
Westerminster Abbey in
Westminster, then just down the river to the west of the Roman and
Saxon settlements of London, and used buildings around the abbey as a
seasonal court.
The Conqueror built a whole court complex around the abbey,
which thus became the center of government.)
As a result the new pronunciation norms
were derived from London English and not from ancestral Wessex which
was in the West Country. Many manuscripts were re-copied into the
newly important London dialect of the ruling classes. Older spelling
norms were abandoned for new ones based on London pronunciations.

Writing had been used for governmental purposes from the beginning of
the Anglo-Saxon era, but for a long time its chief use
remained in the church. After the conquest it was used more and more
for governmental purposes, centered in the royal court and
law courts. The Court of Chancery in London became the seat of
official record-keeping, and by the 1300s spelling norms were
developing noticeably, in a written variety called Chancery English.

The rise of two important centers of learning outside London, Oxford
and Cambridge, by the 1300s affected written norms as well. These
towns had somewhat different dialects, but they were still relatively
close to each other and to the court, and many of the spelling norms
developed there could also be applied to writing the London
dialect. The triangle of London-Oxford-Cambridge, with its revolving
scholarly and clerical workforce, became a large and important center
of developing orthographic norms.

Printing and the beginnings of the information revolution

The advent of printing in the late 1400s drastically changed the speed
at which manuscripts could be produced and therefore disseminated, and
the adoption of paper also helped to make written documents cheaper and more
widespread. These factors encouraged the growth of record-keeping and
bureaucracy and the continued growth in importance of the Court of
Chancery and Chancery English. Property records, tax-collecting and
other financial records, laws, and records of crime and punishment
all burgeoned in the 1500s.

The rise of schools, designed to train not
only religious workers but also secular clerical workers for
government, made it possible to train larger numbers of people in
literacy and thereby also further spread the developing norms for
orthography. The growth of London and its role in public institutions
ensured its importance as the center of a linguistic standard for the
developing nation. Standard written norms based on London English developed and
were used even where local pronunciations were hardly affected by
the sounds of spoken London English. Documents moved around in far
greater numbers than people and thus could influence the norms of the
region more easily than the spoken dialect features of travellers.

The growth of a professionalized class of printers outside of the
direct control of church and government led to the role of printers in
setting norms of writing and spelling. Printers had a strong interest
in standardization to reduce variation and hence make the printing
process easier. The printing profession evolved into the profession of
publishing, and publishers have been important ever since in the
setting of written standards.

During the 1500s, a major upheaval in the pronunciation of English
vowels, the Great English Vowel shift, spread through the
speech community and tore the conservative written
forms of the long vowels away from their changing pronunciations, leaving
English with a set of letter-to-written vowel correspondences
different from everywhere else in Europe, as well as internal
variation that bedevils readers in pairs like divine, divinity.

At about the same time, many inflectional endings were reduced and
finally eliminated, notably many final unstressed e’s. These «silent
e’s» were continued in the spelling system but repurposed as a tool to
signal the value of the long vowels changed in the Great Vowel
Shift (e.g. in mate, name, while etc.). Other sounds were reduced then eliminated, such as the k’s and
g’s in the old clusters kn and gn (as in knight and
gnat) and some of the remnants of Old English yogh, the old
velar fricative (as in neighbor and bough). The result is
the numerous set of «silent letters» that learners find so maddening.

By the late 1500s, under the impetus of printing the tremendous
variety of spellings in written English had shaken down into a far
smaller set of variants, and a great part of the outlines of the
modern orthography was in place. Changes in orthographic norms
slowed considerably, and Modern English was left with a spelling
system from an earlier period of its history: essentially it is a
normalized Middle English system. The result is a set of letter-to-sound
mismatches greater than those of elsewhere in Europe, even in some
respects greater than those of French, whose spelling was codified a
little later.

The Reformation and Renaissance

In the late 1500s England became a Protestant country. As part of the
new doctrine and its administration, new documents were needed such as
liturgies for the recently-established Church of England, the Book of
Common Prayer, and above all, English translations and copies of the
Bible.

The push for an accessible version of Scripture, which meant an
English Bible, began a few centuries earlier but was thwarted until
the church and government adopted the basic tenets of the Reformation.
A number of versions of the scripture in English were produced in the
late 1500s, but the culmination of this trend was the King James Bible
of 1611. This was the most influential and most widespread religious
document of the age, and the norms adopted by the translators and
printers of this Bible had an immense influence on writers.

Dictionaries and Other Linguistic Reference Materials

With the growing use of written language, the need was felt for
materials that presented aspects the language in a way that could be
looked up by all who desired information about the language: first,
non-native speakers and later also native speakers of the language who
wanted to know about newly developed parts of the language that were
not part of every native speakers’ knowledge. The first
dictionaries were essentially lists of «hard words», particularly the
large number of new loanwords from the Classical languages and also
from the new colonies overseas. By the 18th century dictionary-writing
was becoming a recognized activity and scholars and other learned
men were being commissioned by publishers to write such materials.

Elsewhere in Europe language academies were established to codify and
normalize all aspects of language. This trend did not catch on in
English-speaking lands and there has never been an officially
recognized academy for standardization either in Britain or the
U.S. There was however an English version of the trend towards
«language purification» that swept European countries through the
Renaissance and Enlightenment. (This trend never fully died out in the
English speaking world, and we see its echoes in prescriptivist
movements that seek to minimize foreign influences, which are viewed as
threats, probably for nationalistic and ethnic-based reasons. Since
languages do not degenerate but only change with the needs of their
speakers, it is difficult to see how one language could actually
be threatened as long as it has speakers—especially one such as
English with such a numerous body of speakers. A language can be threatened
or endangered only if it ceases to be used at all.) Jonathan Swift was a vocal
proponent of English language purification, but as is usual with
purifiers, his knowledge of the history of the language was faulty and
his beliefs about the reasons for particular norms and why they had to
be upheld were irrational.

The publication of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English
Language was a milestone in the development of dictionary and
reference materials. It adopted a more-or-less descriptivist stance
which is very modern, and at odds with the prescriptive views of
earlier producers of dictionaries. Johnson’s recognition of change as
a normal process and his refusal to see it as degeneration was novel
and important.

By the time of Johnson’s dictionary, the spelling
system in place was recognizably that of current Modern English, with
only a few orthographic peculiarities such as the spelling of
show as shew and the use of the «long S» character
(easily confused with the f of that time). Probably the typefaces in
use at the time give more appearance of difference with modern texts
than any of the remaining spelling differences between 18th century
English and contemporary British English.

The political independence of the United States in the 1770s led to a
push towards identifying distinguishing cultural factors. Language was
an obvious way of distinguishing Americans from Britons, since a
recognizable set of American pronunciation features had already
developed. However, instead of using pronunciation differences to try
to develop a separate written standard, Noah Webster wrote a
dictionary containing some regional, American-dialect based
definitions to set it apart, and also introduced into his dictionary
and other writings a set of
spellings that put a distinctive stamp on American orthography without
changing it too much for mutual intelligibility. In other words, most
of the spelling conventions that had solidified in the British
standard written form by the early 19th century were maintained by Webster,
but he added a few systematic differences:
Using -ize instead of -ise for verbs derived from Greek
verbs in -izein; eliminating u in the suffix -our
(thus moving it away from the French-derived spelling of Middle
English to a spelling somewhat more in line with pronunciation on both
sides of the Atlantic), the replacement of -re in French loans
by -er (centre/center, theatre/theater) and a few other
simplications.

Movements advocating more drastic spelling reform of English emerged in
the 18th century, and there are periodic resurgences of this trend,
which represents an attempt to introduce efficiency and save time for
new learners.

Benjamin Franklin devised an alphabetic system largely keeping
English orthography the same but introducing single symbols for the
current digraphs, and additional symbols for vowel distinctions not
systematically represented in the writing system. (See link under
this essay.)

George Bernard Shaw was a passionate advocate of total spelling reform
and left his entire estate to be devoted to this project.

Systems for extreme changes of spelling, however rational, do not
seem to gain much ground in the English speaking world, probably
because updating the spelling to match pronunciation would make older
documents unintelligible for those learning only the new system, as
well as giving trouble as to how to take account of variations in
pronunciation. Another objection is that historically-oriented people (admittedly, a minority)
would not like to see the history of words containing fossil
traces of earlier forms (i.e. antiquated spellings)
erased by updating to modern rational
spellings.

The existing system has now gone on so long that it is difficult to
turn the clock back too much at once, but only by doing so can the
proponents gain their objective of an entirely rational correspondence between
letters and sounds.

Some other European nations make small orthographic adjustments every
generation or so, and thus keep their spelling gradually evolving
along with (or actually a little bit behind) the pronunciation. The
Scandinavian languages are well-known for this strategy. There was a
spelling reform in Germany in 1989 or so, but it was not a drastic
one, although portrayed as dire by some. Recently major national
newspapers have declared their intention to go back to the old system,
leaving language users in confusion about which standard to adopt.

Modern trends for standardization

Current orthography represents two major centers of standardization:
British and American English. The British standard held sway
throughout the world until very recently, when some other countries
began to first accept and then to teach American orthography and
lexical choices. (Grammatical features have been adopted with
more reluctance it seems.) Pronunciation variants are spread auditorily
rather than via writing, but the same changeover from British
to American norms appears to be occurring.

In the English-speaking world beyond Britain and the U.S., the norms
are coming into flux in some places. The spelling usages of former
colonies Canada and Australia are undergoing change as the influence
of the U.S. is felt more and more. These countries were tied to the
mother country, Britain, longer, and have maintained largely British
orthography, but proximity (in the case of Canada) and cultural
influence are exerting pressure on the norms speakers choose. The use
of U.S. spelling variants seems to be on the rise in the populace in
these countries, despite resistance of schools and government. In
other former colonies such changes are less obvious, but the same
trend may be active.

The spread of electronic communication in the form of computers and
phone texting have provided a large number of abbreviatory
conventions. The enforcers of spelling norms, schools and publishers,
have so far maintained the current orthographic standards in printed
documents. But because spelling norms are hard to acquire given all
the spelling-pronunciation mismatches, and writing has become so
democratized through these technologies, the use of non-standard
spellings (not just abbreviations) is increasingly widespread. Such
changes in usage patterns are bound to have some effect on the written
language ultimately, just as speaker’s usage of words eventually
affects what are considered conventional norms. It is still too early
to tell how these effects on the written language will play
out. Publishing itself as an industry feels endangered by the tidal
wave of un-edited electronic publication on the internet. What happens
to publishing as an industry will probably affect how quickly new
orthographic norms are adopted, since publishing is one of the major
conservative forces of orthographic standardization in the modern
world. The others, schools, government, and church, seem less
powerful in determining the form of the documents that are actually
produced on paper.

Useful Sites on Spelling and Spelling Reform

Ben
Franklin’s phonetic alphabet for reformed spelling. (found by
Travis Smith) Benjamin Franklin
developed a keen interest in spelling reform and this is his system for
a more rational spelling system for English. He even took the trouble
to commission a type foundry to
make the new letters needed for typesetting in his proposed system. (He was a
printer/publisher after all.) He wrote an article about it in 1768
when he was living in London. But then he seems to have lost interest
in the project, possibly because he could not interest anyone else in it.

Writing
system reforms and revolutions (in many languages). In addition to
links on writing and spelling reforms in a wide variety of languages, this site
also includes some nice links to sites about writing systems, the
relation of language to writing systems, spelling games and other
curiosities, and issues related to spelling reform and literacy.

Wikipedia on
English spelling reform. An overview of reasons for and against
spelling reform in English. The arguments against are under the
sections «Obstacles» and «Criticism». There is also a short list of
campaigns for spelling reform in English.

Wikipedia on
spelling reform. An overview of reasons for reform, but arguments
against reform are not given in depth. The overall point of view in
this article, unlike in the one above,
is pro-reform. This site also has short
descriptions of reform efforts for a number of languages.

[Students: If you have any other links on spelling, send them to me.]

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© 2009 Suzanne Kemmer
Last modified 17 Mar 2009