# History of English spelling



## Alxmrphi

*Moderator note:
Split from here.
*


Kevin Beach said:


> Well, as I understand it both French and English words are spelt as they were once pronounced. That so many of them are so different from their spellings suggests that something has gone wrong. Some of it may be due to one or other dialect or accent prevailing over another, but how is it that letters in so many words are simply ignored?


Kevin, there is an absolutely vast body of study done into this area, it's something I am very interested in and I really hope you get inspired to read it because it could not be anywhere more distant to 'laziness of speech'.

Old English was originally spelt in ways that were perculiar (like today), many people spelt things in different ways because of a lack of a common standard then when Middle English came in things started to get written down the way they were spoken (and brought a sense of regularity to the language), then there is a lot of debate over the cause of the Great Vowel Shift (which is a major major factor in the differences between spelling of words and pronunciation) with possible causes due to the rising over the lower classes after the Black Death where lower-class social status was generally highered because of the need for workers and the opportunities for new jobs that they could charge more for. This then led to a mass movement to London in which rural dialects mixed and congregated in London and other major (wealthy) cities like York.

There are other people that said that after this happened (if they don't believe this was the cause, but there is no denying the mass movement to London) then there was a mindset of the lower classes wanting to emulate the higher classes to fit in.
In these higher classes it had been common to speak French (or rather French / Anglo-Norman) and this has also been attributed to meaning that those people who used to speak French had a different accent that affected their English which then became standardised, which the rural classes wanted to immitate to fit in (since some believe they felt they had to since they knew they were actually recently lower-class)

Basically, the vowels produced at the top of the mouth became diphthongs, then that left a gap that was filled by the vowel produced in the slot below, which then left another gap to be filled, and so on....Whether it was back shifting or not all the written vowels seemed to be produced in a new slot of the mouth while the spelling of the words never changed, it was locked in by the invention of writing and in particular the invention of the printing press which had just come into production which meant it caught the spelling and _I would say_ standardised it just before the shift occured, then separate dialectial variants of words came about and were used and some entered into the popular language.

The in-depth study of how and where these changes came about, resulting in what spelling we have today is an amazing story, it really is not laziness of speech, though I can sort of see why someone might think that..

Sorry if this was OT!


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## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> Old English was originally spelt in ways that were perculiar (like today), ...


What makes you think that? As I see it, Old English was written pretty much as spoken. Of course the sound values of certain letters differed from Latin to fit the phonological needs of OE. But that is quite normal when one language adopts a writing system developed for another language.

The peculiarity (to take your word) of Modern English is due to the fact that spelling "froze" (well, almost) in late Middle English and the spelling still reflects the pronunciation of the 15th century. I agree with you that this has nothing to do with "laziness".


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## Alxmrphi

> The peculiarity (to take your word) of Modern English is due to the fact that spelling "froze" (well, almost) in late Middle English and the spelling still reflects the pronunciation of the 15th century


Exactly! That's what I meant to say, it got 'locked' by the time the shift happened.
I'll try and explain my other point, 'perculiar(ity)' was definitely the wrong word to use, and what I meant was that there were many dialects of Old English (Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish & West Saxon) that pre-date the Middle English period (even that of the Norman Conquest, and words in literature were often spelt differently according to the dialect of the region, generally Northumbrian and Mercian were similar to each other and can be considered collectively as Anglian even though they showed some differences between each other, had differences from Kentish (which, well really can't be extensively proved because there just isn't a lot to go on when it comes to written records).

Along comes West Saxon... when all the Barons and Earls were squabbling, and everyone was trying to call themselves King, eventually the West Saxon region of England won, and slowly and steadily rule became established and centralised there (power-base) and as a consequence the literature that was produced in that region became a sort of literally standard* ("A History of The English Language", p51) which meant that the other very limited amounts of evidence we had today have similarities that go against grammatical / spelling-like feature of that dialect (I can't remember where I read that but I will try and find the quote!) so it appears that the rule of the West Saxon kingdom established a literary standard where before there had been differences, though I guess the speech would have been different accordingly (but I don't know) so what I said before should have made this clear, I was thinking in terms of text and not realising that pronunciation would be different, but at that same time if literature and spelling was being produced while the normal spoken language was of a different style (i.e. the differences that made them different dialects) then it is having a writing system that doesn't reflect how it is spoken so I guess it sort of is valid today.

Another quote from that book I cited before is "_Such a start as it had made toward becoming the standard speech of English (West Saxon) was cut short by the Norman Conquest, which reduced all dialects to a common level of unimportance. And when in the late Middle English period a standard English once more began to arise, it was on the basis of a different dialect, that of the East Midlands_."

That's what I remembered when I posted before, that differences in writing / speech were around when a common literary standard was spread across the country, then being hindered / quashed (depends on how you view it ) by the Norman Conquest, it reverted back to its own developments (though there aren't really any written texts except for a fragment of a poem here and there and a load of boundary clauses in land-ownership related documents) that can fully back up this point. Unfortunately I can't find any good quotes to back this up right now.

I think I've lost track of what my point was a bit here in all the excitement!
In hindsight I shouldn't have written that part without thinking about the quotes to back it up.

I suppose it's only minimal details compared to what we have today, with spelling that can be so amazingly different to how we say the sounds, I did find a comparison of 3 pieces of Middle English text written around the year 1300 which do have varied ways of spelling common words [now I am not talking about Old English and the following isn't in support of evidence to back up my earlier quote] (here it's languages as all of them are relating to the inter-relationship of Latin / French and English).. I'll only write relevant lines of each, but I hope it points out the fact of the flexibility of words in their spelling (that were pronounced the same)

_Schau sum thing that Ik haf in hert,_
_On *Ingelis *tong that alle may,_
_<>_
_And bathe klerk and laued man,_
_*Englis* understand kan,_
_That was born in *Ingland*,_
_<>_
_Understand *Latin *and *Frankis*,_
_Forthi me think almous it isse_
_To wirke sum god thing on *Inglisse*,_

Here 'English' it is spelt three different ways in the same stanza.

William of Nassyngton's Speculum Vitae of Mirror of Life (c. 1325) spells these words: *English*, *Latyn*, *Inglande*, *Frensche*.
From 'Arthur and Merlin' (also c. 1325); *Inglische*, *Inglond*, *Freynsche*.
Bede's Polychronicon (c. 1327): *Frensche*, *Engelond*,* Frensce*.
The "Statute of Pleading" (c. 1362) has: *French*, *English*, *Latin*.

I'm not really posting this to prove my point, I just wanted to point out that spelling was flexible around this time and does give the impression that words were spelt in different ways than they were spoken. This isn't that strange, considering the major stepping stone of English losing its declensional system, by changing the *-m* to an *-n* in the dative plural endings of verbs and strong nouns, which then gets left off leading a scwha, this scwha was spelt in many different ways (resulting in the common adoption of *-e*), all I am pointing out is it was quite flexible and lent itself very well to poetic needs, before the GVS happened, we had different / flexible spellings, at this stage they were still there! 

So going back to what I meant.. Early Middle English had the ability to be spelt differently, that might not have been how people actually said the words (like today's situation), so the idea of words not being identical to the way they are spelt isn't because of a recent batch of laziness but it we did have a very 'liberal' situation with spelling before a standard was set and it's the way language develops. 

Which brings me to the next point, isn't laziness getting things back on track with SMS-Chatspeak / Isntant-Messaging language, that I would say is laziness, but it seems to be restoring logic to our spelling.... _that's something to think about_ 

_p.s I'm still very new to this idea of historical linguistics so if anyone has anything to add / change, any spanners to throw in the works please please do, I am not preaching this as an absolute truth it's just my understanding of what I have read so I do welcome anyone who is more experienced to point out any inconsistencies I made, thanks!_


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## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> I'm not really posting this to prove my point, I just wanted to point out that spelling was flexible around this time and does give the impression that words were *spelt in different ways than they were spoken*.


I don't think so. People simply spelt the words as they heard them. Let's take your example _Englis_ vs._ Ingland_: Stressed short high front vowels were relatively stable in the history of English ([y] was lost already in Old English): <i>=[ɪ] and <e>=[ɛ]. But there is evidence that in front of [ŋ] the short stressed <e> was often closed, i.e. [eŋ] rather than [ɛŋ] which explains modern English _string_ < Middle English _streng_ and the modern English pronunciation of English as ['ɪŋlɪʃ] rather than ['ɛŋlɪʃ]. Hence, the variation of the first letter in _Englis_ and _Ingland_ is best explained by phonetic similarity ([ɪ] and [e] are very close; this is by the way also the same reason why you have French _de_ and Italian _di_: after the loss of vowel length in Vulgar Latin the formerly short <i> [ɪ] and the formerly long <e> [e:] became almost indistinguishable).


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## Linnets

berndf said:


> the modern English pronunciation of English as ['ɪŋlɪʃ]


Shouldn't it be ['ɪŋ*ɡ*lɪʃ], at least "officially"?


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## berndf

Webster's has both. To me ['ɪŋɡlɪʃ] sounds hyper-corrected.


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## Hulalessar

berndf said:


> People simply spelt the words as they heard them.



I am not sure it is quite as simple as that. It assumes that everyone agreed on what symbols should represent what sounds, and that may not have been the case.

Complications certainly started to arise when some letters were in some cases assigned the same value they had in French at the time. Even more complications arose when people who knew Latin and were too clever for their own good started to write words as they had _never _been pronounced, e.g. _debt_ from OF _dette_, but influenced by Latin _debitum_.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> It assumes that everyone agreed on what symbols should represent what sounds...


I don't think my statement assumes this.





Hulalessar said:


> Even more complications arose when people who knew Latin and were too clever for their own good started to write words as they had _never _been pronounced, e.g. _debt_ from OF _dette_, but influenced by Latin _debitum_.


This is Chancery English spelling. Alex's point was about ME spelling before the introduction of this standard.


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## Sepia

berndf said:


> I don't think so. People simply spelt the words as they heard them. Let's take your example _Englis_ vs._ Ingland_: Stressed short high front vowels were relatively stable in the history of English ([y] was lost already in Old English): <i>=[ɪ] and <e>=[ɛ]. But there is evidence that in front of [ŋ] the short stressed <e> was often closed, i.e. [eŋ] rather than [ɛŋ] which explains modern English _string_ < Middle English _streng_ and the modern English pronunciation of English as ['ɪŋlɪʃ] rather than ['ɛŋlɪʃ]. Hence, the variation of the first letter in _Englis_ and _Ingland_ is best explained by phonetic similarity ([ɪ] and [e] are very close; this is by the way also the same reason why you have French _de_ and Italian _di_: after the loss of vowel length in Vulgar Latin the formerly short <i> [ɪ] and the formerly long <e> [e:] became almost indistinguishable).


 

I always wondered why "pound" is spelled with "ou" - until I heard how it is pronounced in Ireland. In fact, by listening to Irish and Scottish people I figured out why a lot of words are spelled the way they are. Sometimes we don't even have to go as far back as OE, although it helps.


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## berndf

Sepia said:


> I always wondered why "pound" is spelled with "ou" - until I heard how it is pronounced in Ireland. In fact, by listening to Irish and Scottish people I figured out why a lot of words are spelled the way they are. Sometimes we don't even have to go as far back as OE, although it helps.


Correct, this particular sound shift happend after the year 1500 during the Great Vowel Shift. Even in England itself you still find dialect having retained the old pronunciation of "ou".


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## clevermizo

berndf said:


> Webster's has both. To me ['ɪŋɡlɪʃ] sounds hyper-corrected.



It may be a hyper-correction, but I always say ['ɪŋɡlɪʃ]. I've been thinking about it and saying it aloud and ['ɪŋlɪʃ] sounds weird to me, or unnatural. But I wouldn't think twice about it if I heard a native English speaker say it.

But, I would never say [sɪŋɡɪŋ] only [sɪŋɪŋ], so I don't know what the rule would be here to predict it.


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## Perkele

I believe that the word-final ng was some day pronounced with g but it was lost during centuries. However, word-internal ng did not lose the ending g.

This is very logical as a word-internal ng can be split so that n and g are part of different syllables. In a word-final ng a similar split would leave g as a syllable nucleus. So a word-final ng is more of a single sound and word-internal ng is two different sounds and the n just happens to velarize.

Now, you have your word-final ngs OR multi-morpheme words:
singing (sing+ing)
singer (sing+er)

And your word-internal ngs OR single-morpheme words:
English
finger

If you have a verb [siŋ] and a suffix [iŋ] why would you want to add something in between?


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## effeundici

In Italy children ask frequently: _Daddy, why do English don't write like they speak_?? 

This happens because Italian is more or less a phonetical language. I think it was easy. Italian comes from Latin and Latin alphabet was invented to reproduce our sounds.

The question is: why have we never experienced a great vowel shift or something similar? Basically not many changes have occured _(gl, gn, sce,sci,...) _in 2.000 years. And we've experienced lots of wars, invasions and millions of people have moved from the country to the cities.

My answer is: because our alphabet was strictly connected to our sounds while latin alphabet was poorly connected to OE even at the very beginning.

I'm thinking to english vowels for example, how can you reproduce all those vowel sounds with only 5 simbols?

What do you think?


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## berndf

Classical Latin had vowel shifts. "Ae" became and open "e", "oe" became a closed "e". From Latin to Italian "de" became "di". But these shifts are relatively insignificant compared the "Great Vowel Shift" in English or the "Neuhochdeutsche Vokalverschiebung" in German. Maybe because Italian has virtually no diphthongues? Many vowel shifts are either diphthongizations of monophthongs or vice versa. There are other Romance languages with significant shifts, e.g. French "eau" is today pronounced like "o" and "oi" is pronounced "wa".


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## CapnPrep

I agree with Perkele's generalizations about English "ng" (maybe these few messages should be moved into a separate thread). I know of very few exceptions:


 The [g] does reappear before the adjectival suffixes _-er_/_-est_ (_long_, _longer_, _longest_). Also, there are some conservative dialects of English where morpheme-final [ŋg] is preserved more widely, even in words like _singing_.
  In some monomorphemic words, "ng" can be pronounced [ŋ] without [g] (_dinghy_, _hangar_). And there are some varieties, esp. of American English, where this is more widespread; this is where you might hear _English_ without [g].
I suspect that berndf feels that ['ɪŋɡlɪʃ] is a hypercorrection because the corresponding German word has no [g]. But this is in fact the majority pronunciation in English, and ['ɪŋlɪʃ] is regionally/socially marked.


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## Montesacro

berndf said:


> Maybe because Italian has virtually no diphthongues?


 
But Italian has diphthongs!


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## effeundici

berndf said:


> Classical Latin had vowel shifts. "Ae" became and open "e", "oe" became a closed "e". From Latin to Italian "de" became "di". But these shifts are relatively insignificant compared the "Great Vowel Shift" in English or the "Neuhochdeutsche Vokalverschiebung" in German. Maybe because Italian has virtually no diphthongues? Many vowel shifts are either diphthongizations of monophthongs or vice versa. There are other Romance languages with significant shifts, e.g. French "eau" is today pronounced like "o" and "oi" is pronounced "wa".


 
_de _became _di; _but the relevant writing changed accordingly!!

In my opinion the correspondance between sounds e symbols has always been very strong in Italian speakers and any change in pronounciation will *always *be followed by a change in writing.

On the contrary, English speakers have never had the concept of a strict correspondance between sounds and symbols, therefore changing the pronounciation without changing the writing is not considered _taboo._

Yes, that's my idea, a difference between symbols and sounds has always been a *taboo* among Latin/Italian speakers and this has mantained Italian a phonetic language for more than 2.000 years.

For example when Italian developed the new sound ɲɲ , which did not exist in Latin, we developed a rule for writing it down even if lacking a proper single symbol ==> "*gn"*

Of course, all above is not completely true, but I think it can be true..enough.

What do you think?


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## berndf

effeundici said:


> On the contrary, English speakers have *never* had the concept of a strict correspondance between sounds and symbols, therefore changing the pronounciation without changing the writing is not considered _taboo._


"Never" is not correct. Until the introduction of Chancery English in the 15th century, spelling followed pronunciation. What obviously happened is that consistency and constancy of spelling achieved by the introduction of Chancery Spelling was considered more important than consistency with pronunciation.





effeundici said:


> For example when Italian developed the new sound ɲɲ , which did not exist in Latin, we developed a rule for writing it down even if lacking a proper single symbol ==> "*gn"*


Latin used "gn" to represent [ŋn]. The Italian [ɲ:] is an evolution of this, i.e. a sound shift, e.g. _agnellus_ [aŋ'nɛl:ʊs] > _agnello_ [a'ɲ:ɛl: o]


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## Linnets

Montesacro said:


> But Italian has diphthongs!


I think he was referring to phonological diphthongs, such as _ae_, _oe_, _au_ of Latin and _ei_/_ai_, _au_ and _äu_/_eu_ of German.



berndf said:


> Latin used "gn" to represent [ŋn]. The Italian [ɲ:] is an evolution of this, i.e. a sound shift, e.g. _agnellus_ [aŋ'nɛl:ʊs] > _agnello_ [a'ɲ:ɛl: o]


True, but I prefer to transcribe Italian geminates with double symbols to differentiate this from vowel/consonant lengthenings occurring for prosodic reasons: thus [aɲ'ɲɛllo 'bwɔ:no] (notice the second element of the geminate belonging to another syllable, since the elements are heterosyllabic) and [uɱ'bwɔn aɲ'ɲɛl:lo] with a further lengthening of [l] in tune position or for emphasis. In phonological transcriptions all this should be omitted, of course: /aɲ'ɲɛllo/.


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## Alxmrphi

Linnets said:


> I think he was referring to phonological diphthongs, such as _ae_, _oe_, _au_ of Latin and _ei_/_ai_, _au_ and _äu_/_eu_ of German.


 
Can you tell me the distinction between phonological diphthongs and the ones that were mentioned in the wikipedia article?

What I can see is those "_phonological diphthongs_" are individual and different to a combination of their split parts (like 'au' in a Germanic language like Icelandic) is not 'a' + 'i') but for example in an Italian word like 'potei' 'ei' (diphthong) is a combination of its individual sounds 'e' + 'i').

Is this what you meant? That's just a complete guess so I just would like confirmation about what you meant with that quote.


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## berndf

Linnets said:


> True, but I prefer to transcribe Italian geminates with double symbols to differentiate this from vowel/consonant lengthenings occurring for prosodic reasons: thus [aɲ'ɲɛllo 'bwɔ:no] (notice the second element of the geminate belonging to another syllable, since the elements are heterosyllabic) and [uɱ'bwɔn aɲ'ɲɛl:lo] with a further lengthening of [l] in tune position or for emphasis. In phonological transcriptions all this should be omitted, of course: /aɲ'ɲɛllo/.


I have no problems with that an I appreciate your point.


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## Linnets

Alxmrphi said:


> Can you tell me the distinction between phonological diphthongs and the ones that were mentioned in the wikipedia article?
> 
> What I can see is those "_phonological diphthongs_" are individual and different to a combination of their split parts (like 'au' in a Germanic language like Icelandic) is not 'a' + 'i') but for example in an Italian word like 'potei' 'ei' (diphthong) is a combination of its individual sounds 'e' + 'i').
> 
> Is this what you meant? That's just a complete guess so I just would like confirmation about what you meant with that quote.



Yes, phonological diphthongs are monophonemic, i.e. they count as a  single phoneme (this is confirmed by dialectal variations involving the whole diphthong and never the single elements), while Italian (and Spanish) diphthongs are _always _diphonemic. German /ae/ (or /aɪ/, according to some sources) in _Polizei_ is a single phoneme, while Italian /ai/ in _avrai _is composed by two phonemes, even if the actual phonetic realization could be very similar.


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