We would be naïve to expect a writing system to reproduce exactly the sounds of talking. It is a set of visual patterns that can be related to speech, rather than a faithful transcription. The shapes of sounds vary from one speaker to the next. Speech is continuous: when I am talking there is a constant flow of sound, without the breaks that occur between words on the page. A system of visible marks cannot exactly represent sounds. A writing system is conventional – an invented device, not a duplication of speech, and something into which one needs to be initiated by an instructor. Moreover, writing has functions other than representing sounds, and the production of speech and writing are handled differently by the brain; the two activities realize the abstract system of language in distinct ways. In some languages, such as Finnish, the relationship between graphemes and phonemes is almost perfect. In others, such as Japanese, a mixture of systems is used in any written text, and people who learn Japanese have to memorize the written forms of words rather than being able to deduce these forms from the words’ component sounds.9
In practice, four-fifths of English spellings conform to patterns we can readily see – Steven Pinker gives a figure of 84 per cent10 – and only about 3 per cent of English words are spelled in ways that are genuinely anomalous. Of more immediate help is the realization that spoken English contains more than forty distinct sounds – forty-four is the number usually stated – but is not written with forty or more letters. Our 26-letter alphabet, an augmented version of the 23-letter alphabet of Latin, contains three arguably redundant letters (c, q and x), but others have to do more than one job. The sounds of English are in fact represented by roughly 1,100 different arrangements of letters. The most common vowel sound in English is not the sound of any of those with which we are familiar; it’s the quick ‘uh’ sound known as a schwa – a term borrowed from Hebrew – which we hear in bottom, supply, cadet and eloquent.
It has long been customary to suggest that the ability to spell is a social and professional skill, one of those small but telling accomplishments that earn credit at school and in the workplace – and an essential marker of good social standing. In 1750 Lord Chesterfield, who presented himself as a great arbiter of manners, wrote to his son that one false spelling could condemn a man to ridicule for the rest of his life. Noting his son’s misspelling of induce and grandeur as ‘enduce’ and ‘grandure’, Chesterfield alleged that few of his housemaids would have been guilty of such slips. I suspect he may have been wrong about this, but in any case there has long been a contrary view – persistent, even if not widespread – that correct spelling is a marker of pedantry rather than authenticity. Fussiness about spelling is, accordingly, associated with dullness. One of the best literary examples is in Alexander Pope’s poem The Dunciad, published in 1728. Pope suggests in a note that the title should really be The Dunceiad, so as not to offend the punctilious Shakespeare scholar Lewis Theobald, who had insisted on restoring to the playwright’s name the final e that Pope had previously chosen to omit. The ‘hero’ of Pope’s poem is the King of Dunces, Tibbald. Pope implies that, if Theobald’s editorial schemes were followed through to their natural conclusion, this would be the true spelling of his name.
For those anxious about English spelling’s obstructions and perplexities, systematic reform has seemed the obvious solution. It has been explicitly advocated at least since the 1530s. The reformists can be divided into two camps: those who propose enlarging the alphabet to take account of the sounds it does not deal with adequately, and those who more modestly propose sticking to the existing alphabet but sorting out some of the more troublesome inconsistencies.
In the 1530s the main promoter of reform was Sir John Cheke, a Cambridge scholar of Greek. Cheke was supported by his Cambridge colleague Sir Thomas Smith. The two men followed Erasmus in their approach to the sounds of Greek; rather than pronouncing the Classical form of the language the way contemporary Greek sounded, in which there was often little correspondence between grapheme and phoneme, they recovered what they believed to be the authentic ancient pronunciation, in which this correspondence was exact and sounds were not confused. Having reconstructed the sounds of Greek, they set about doing the same for English. Cheke died in 1557, aged forty-three; Smith lived twenty years longer and had time to develop their work. He wrote an English usage guide (in Latin), in which he put the case for a 34-letter alphabet that used accents on vowels to indicate their length and quality.
Between 1551 and 1570 John Hart mounted a more sustained campaign, producing three works on English spelling and pronunciation. The first of these was graced with the unflinching title The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of our Inglish Toung. Struck by the difficulties that the unruliness of English writing posed for foreigners and ‘the rude countrie Englishman’, he described the existing ways of spelling as ‘a darke kind of writing’. Hart argued the need for a new alphabet and phonetic spelling, which he believed would ‘save the one third, or at least the one quarter, of the paper, ynke, and time which we now spend superfluously in writing and printing’.11 Like Smith, he used accents. He also suggested replacing ‘ch’ with a twirly symbol a bit like a drunken g. He was the first person to write about intonation in English speech, and made other original observations, but his work did not find a significant audience.
The ideas of Smith and Hart were built upon in the 1580s by William Bullokar, whose jaundiced view of English spelling was informed by his experiences as a schoolmaster. He proposed spelling reform as part of a three-pronged attack on the peculiarities of English; it would also include an authoritative grammar and a dictionary. He too employed accents and a few new squiggles to represent the forty-four distinct English sounds he identified. His system managed to be complicated without being comprehensive. We can gauge its texture from his translation of Aesop’s Fables. When he writes of ‘A frog being desirous to match to an ox’, the word desirous is spelled thus: a regular d and e are followed by what looks like a snoozing 3, then by a y with an acute accent, an r, an o with a sort of cedilla joined to another o with a dot below it, and an ordinary s. A couple of sentences on, though is presented as ‘thowh’, and among the few words to appear in completely familiar form are when, the and ox.12
The typical pattern in the sixteenth century was for reform to be mooted, but for schemes of reform to be sketchy or peculiar. It was easy to fulminate about the deficiencies of English spelling, but difficult to conceptualize a plan for sorting them out – let alone enact such a plan. The most widely acknowledged programme was devised by Richard Mulcaster. His The First Part of the Elementarie (1582) was intended, as its title suggests, to be the opening section of a substantial work of educational reform. Instead of furnishing a new spelling system, Mulcaster favoured stabilizing the existing one. A dictionary, he saw, would be invaluable as a means of bringing this about. One of Mulcaster’s more successful ideas was that a monosyllabic word with a short vowel sound should not have a doubled final consonant – so, one should write not bedd or bedde, as was then common, but bed. For evidence of this advance, we can look to the (posthumous) First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623: hadde appeared there just once, whereas there were 1,398 examples of had.
Mulcaster also makes an interesting connection between spelling and handwriting, noticing for instance that a word would often be written with a double l at the end where a single one would do because of the unthinking swiftness of cursive handwriting: ‘It is the swiftnesse of the pen sure, which can hardlie staie upon the single endling l, that causeth this dubling.’13 The hand of the poet Sir Philip Sidney exemplifies the sixteenth-century tendency for an author’s handwriting to accelerate as he approaches a conclusion. From around 1560 the fashion in handwriting was for a compact, rapid and obliquely angled hand, which often descended into an illegible scrawl. It was normal at this time to employ an italic style of handwriting for Latin and a ‘secretary’ hand – more calligraphic, but also quirkier and more facile – for English.14 By the end of the s
eventeenth century, writers such as John Dryden were practising a rounder hand.
Looking at books produced in this period, one sees what these reformers were up against. In a single page one might read of coronation and crownacion, of a rogue and a roage, and of something that has been, bin or beene. This was probably down to the compositors who prepared pages for the press, rather than to their authors. Even people’s names were spelled inconsistently, the most celebrated example being Shakespeare, who was also Shakspere, Shaxper, Shackspeare, Shexpere and plenty more besides. One sees how important the idea of alphabetical order was, yet it was only during the Renaissance that this became the main principle used to organize and sequence words. The word alphabet is not recorded before 1580; in Old English it had been the abecede or the stæfræw. Alphabetical, alphabetary and alphabetic are first attested by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1567, 1569 and 1642, respectively. The noun alphabetarian, signifying someone learning or studying the alphabet, appears in 1614.
Up until the eighteenth century there was some uncertainty about which letters were to be considered the true components of our alphabet – for instance, were i and j to be treated as separate or essentially the same? Plenty of those who produced spelling books believed that the letter q served no useful purpose, and some felt the same way about c and x. In The English Primrose (1644), a book aimed at helping young learners to spell, Richard Hodges proposed that the letter w be known as wee; more than a hundred years later its name was still debated, with John Yeomans, a Chelsea schoolmaster, one of several proposing it be called oo.
These attempts at tidying up the language may have contained some odd ideas, but the impulse behind them was practical. Teachers lamented the obstinacy of printers, and the desire for progress was evident in spelling books, which were plentiful. These slim volumes comprised lessons that guided learners from a grasp of the alphabet to a full command of reading. A feature of spelling books is that they allow only one spelling per word. The first truly successful one was The English Schoole-Maister, published by Edmund Coote in 1596. Coote wrote the book shortly after being appointed master of a school in Bury St Edmunds. Ironically, not long after its appearance he was obliged – for reasons now unknown – to give up this post. But his practical approach was much copied. It was soon conventional for spelling books to be marketed as ‘easy’, ‘brief’, ‘delightful’, ‘true’ or ‘pleasant’. In the seventeenth century they often have long-winded but congenial titles; examples include Thomas Crosse’s 1686 The experienc’d instructer, or a legacy to supply poor parents and their children to read distinctly, by the rule of spelling exactly and George Fisher’s 1693 Plurimum in minimo, or a new spelling book; being the most easy, speedy, and pleasant, way to learn to read and write true English. Their eighteenth-century inheritors tend to sound more severe, and the emphasis then is on completeness, extensiveness and comprehensiveness.
Useful progress was made. The real achievements of the seventeenth century were standardization and rationalization. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, with the standard entrenched, criticism of wayward spelling became commonplace. By 1750 there was not much doubt about how words should be spelled, and the result was increased disparagement of those who appeared uncertain. That said, the gap between what we do in public and what we may do in private has never been completely closed. Even Dr Johnson could be inconsistent; in the Dictionary he listed as the correct forms chapel, duchess and pamphlet, but elsewhere he wrote chappel, dutchess and pamflet. Dickens in his letters wrote trowsers rather than trousers, George Eliot surprize, Darwin cruize, and Queen Victoria cozy.15 In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Caxtons (1849) there is a whimsical figure by the name of Dr Herman who is known to have written ‘a great many learned works against every pre-existing method of instruction’, and ‘that which had made the greatest noise was upon the infamous fiction of Spelling-Books’. In Dr Herman’s opinion, ‘A more lying, roundabout, puzzle-headed delusion than that by which we Confuse the clear instincts of truth in our accursed systems of spelling, was never concocted by the father of falsehood.’ ‘How,’ he wonders, ‘can a system of education flourish that begins by so monstrous a falsehood, which the sense of hearing suffices to contradict?’ Herman, who is one of ‘those new-fashioned authorities in education’, teaches ‘a great many things too much neglected at schools’, his particular speciality being ‘that vague infinite nowadays called “useful knowledge”’.
The desire to improve the English spelling system did not abate. A Scottish schoolmaster, James Elphinston, occupied himself with the matter for the last four decades of the eighteenth century. The character of his efforts can be gauged from a single sentence of his writing: ‘Scarce creddibel doz it seem, to’ dhe anallogists ov oddher diccions, dhat hiddherto’, in Inglish exhibiscion, evvery vowel and evvery consonant ar almoast az often falsifiers az immages ov dhe truith.’ A better scheme was that of Isaac Pitman, who first publicized his Stenographic Soundhand in 1837 when he was just twenty-four. Eventually Pitman proposed that the familiar letters of the alphabet be replaced with a new set of thirty-eight characters. His grandson James joined with Mont Follick, the Labour Member of Parliament for Loughborough, in order to try and establish the Initial Teaching Alphabet for use in children’s education. Follick in fact wanted to rebuild the language from the ground up, and his proposals included doing away with plurals as well as both a and the.
In the 1890s H. G. Wells published an essay entitled ‘For Freedom of Spelling. The Discovery of an Art’, which began with the observation: ‘It is curious that people do not grumble more at having to spell correctly.’ Wells continued, ‘It is strange that we should cling so steadfastly to correct spelling. Yet again, one can partly understand the business, if one thinks of the little ways of your schoolmaster and schoolmistress. This sanctity of spelling is stamped upon us in our earliest years. The writer recalls a period of youth wherein six hours a week were given to the study of spelling, and four hours to all other religious instruction.’ Reflecting on the numbing effects of this, he wondered, ‘Why, after all, should correct spelling be the one absolutely essential literary merit? For it is less fatal for an ambitious scribe to be as dull as Hoxton than to spell in diverse ways.’ We may be thrown by the idea of Hoxton being dull – either it means nothing to us, or the characterization of this now vibrant London neighbourhood seems off-beam – but Wells builds to an important point: that ‘spelling has become mixed up with moral feeling’.16
The Simplified Spelling Society was founded in 1908, to raise awareness of the problems caused by irregularities in English spelling and promote remedies for them. It still exists, and its website likens the modernization of spelling to the decimalization of currency – a specious parallel. In America a similar organization, the Simplified Spelling Board, was established in 1906. It was a pet interest of the hugely rich steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who subsidized it to the tune of $25,000 per annum. President Theodore Roosevelt took it seriously enough to decree that the federal printing office adopt three hundred of its new spellings: among them instil, good-by and thorofare. He attracted ridicule, with the Baltimore Sun going so far as to wonder whether he would be amenable to spelling his name Rusevelt – or ‘get down to the fact and spell it “butt-in-sky”’.17 Roosevelt’s enthusiasm waned, and within a few years so did that of Carnegie. Unimpressed by the Board, he told the publisher Henry Holt that ‘A more useless body of men never came into association.’18 The Board relocated from Manhattan’s Madison Avenue to the Lake Placid club in upstate New York – there to fade into oblivion. In 1922 members taking breakfast at the Club would have perused menus offering ‘sausaj’, ‘cofi’ and ‘huni gridl cakes’.19 But golf and tennis were higher priorities for them than orthographic reform.
Altogether more extreme was the Shaw alphabet. This was a system of forty new letter shapes devised by George Bernard Shaw and generously sponsored in his will. Shaw, who described himself as a ‘social d
ownstart’, became interested in spelling reform as a young man in the 1870s, and he pursued the matter right up till his death in 1950. There is a popular story that he highlighted the inconsistencies of English spelling by pointing out that, bearing in mind relationships between letters and sounds that could be found elsewhere in English, the word fish could be spelled ghoti. After all, gh sounded like f in enough, o sounded like an i in women, and ti was pronounced sh in nation. In fact, it was probably not Shaw who first came up with the example of ghoti, and in any case there are reasons why the suggestion is flawed – the i sound in women is unique, and gh is only pronounced f when it appears at the end of a morpheme, while for ti to be pronounced sh it needs to be followed by a vowel. But Shaw was passionately concerned with amending the inconsistencies of spelling, which he connected with injustice, noting that a child who was asked to spell the word debt and offered as his answer d-e-t would be punished for not spelling it with a b because Julius Caesar had spelled its Latin original with a b. Ever a speculative dealer in bright new ideas, H. G. Wells acknowledged the value of such amendments in principle, but confessed that Shaw’s revised spellings ‘catch at my attention as it travels along the lane of meaning, like trailing briars’.20
Radical reform, with its large proposals, has been characterized by hyperbole. The more credible evangelists have made more modest claims. A nice parody of reformed English, often attributed to Mark Twain, appears to have been the work of the comparatively obscure M. J. Shields:
In Year 1 that useless letter ‘c’ would be dropped to be replased either by ‘k’ or ‘s’, and likewise ‘x’ would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which ‘c’ would be retained would be the ‘ch’ formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform ‘w’ spelling, so that ‘which’ and ‘one’ would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish ‘y’ replasing it with ‘i’ and Iear 4 might fiks the ‘g/j’ anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6–12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez ‘c’, ‘y’ and ‘x’ – bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez – tu riplais ‘ch’, ‘sh’, and ‘th’ rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
The Language Wars Page 9
