Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling

by David Wolman

  Those experiences stung. I interpreted my trouble with spelling at home and at school as an indication that the uppermost echelons of achievement were beyond my reach. And the feeling persisted. College, graduate school, fancy fellowship—in the recesses of my mind lurked this quiet fear that if someone were to observe via hidden camera just how much I rely on spell-check, I’d be outed, publicly scorned, and required to forfeit my degrees.

  Sometimes when I think about language, my thoughts drift to those questions used to kick-start conversations in summer-camp cabins or company retreat conference rooms. If you won twenty million dollars, what would you do with it? If you could go anywhere on earth, where would you go and who would you bring? One such question that has always stuck with me goes like this: If you could have a single superhuman power, what would it be and why? Flight, immortality, mind-reading—there are some enticing possibilities.

  I would choose to be fluent in every language. This desire stems from the fact that I travel a lot and regret my foreign-language ineptitude. But this wish for Tower of Babel software coded into my brain may also be an offshoot of my spelling woes, and of what I once perceived—and what society has led me to perceive—to be a deficiency when it comes to communicating in my native tongue. Spelling and fluency are obviously different, but being the planet’s ultimate communicator would go a long way to alleviate the insecurity that goes with being a crap speller.

  Decades have passed since those spelling duels with my brother, and although poor spelling skills haunt me, they’re no handicap. I suppose it’s a testament to the importance of word usage over spelling acumen that a guy like me can make his living wielding words that he can’t spell aloud. Yet from time to time I can’t help but wonder whether spelling ability reflects, if only just a little, a person’s grasp of language. The same thought sometimes occurs when a misspelling foils one of my attempts at what should have been an easy crossword puzzle, or when I ask a Scrabble opponent for a spelling clarification. What does it mean not to be a spelling wizard?

  As a weak speller, I have some questions that need answering. Why does English have such a screwy spelling system, and who can be blamed for predicaments like the silent “h” in rhubarb, the dizzying doubles in reconnaissance, or the e-versus-a confusion of calendar? Yes, colonel derives from Italian. But etymology isn’t everything. Why weren’t words coming into English from other languages adjusted for more regular spelling? What happened during history’s most intense episodes of spelling reform? How did memorization of correct spellings become a coveted attribute of the educated class, and what will happen to orthography in cyberspace?

  This book is my journey into the past and future of English spelling. It’s an everyman’s review of how the words of our language acquired their current form, a study of the quest to change the spelling code, and an exploration of spelling convention and innovation in the digital age. To begin, I need to retrace the origins of our language and the early influences on modern spelling. That means a hop across the pond.

  TWO

  CROSSED

  …an acquaintance with the Saxon language, the mother tongue of the English, has convinced me, that a careful revision of our present dictionaries is absolutely necessary to a correct knowledge of the language.1

  From the preface to Noah Webster’s A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806)

  THROUGH THE DAWN MIST, I watched as the engines of the SeaFrance ferry churned the dark teal waters into foaming, chaotic pools. The brasseries, B-rate hotels, and massive cable factory at the French port of Calais weren’t here fifteen centuries ago, but the autumn weather may have been similarly gray. It was from coastal points such as this where the ancestors of English departed continental Europe for the mysterious island across the sea.

  The boat’s decor is hybrid discotheque-lounge circa 1991: yellow light fixtures, circular purple tables with matching leather chairs, and a zebra-patterned carpet. Near me a British businessman read Ian McEwan, a Muslim woman spoke French into a mobile phone, and three middle-aged Scandinavian women sipped vending-machine coffees and chatted loudly. A posse of lanky German high-school students paced between the videogame arcade and the front of the ship.

  Travelers en route to Britain 1,500 years ago spoke a number of different languages. They were members of ancient tribes: Angles and Saxons, but also Jutes and Frisians. It’s impossible to know just how intelligible each group and subgroup found each other, but the dialects and languages they spoke were all part of what linguists call the Germanic family of languages. Looking even further back, the predecessor tongue to Germanic languages is known as Proto-Indo-European, probably spoken in and around the Baltic areas of Europe some five thousand to eight thousand years ago.2 Over time, tribes and languages began splitting and expanding throughout the continent, and the commonality of those dialects is visible in modern-day English, German, and Dutch. Look, for example, at hundred, Hundert and hundrede, or bear, Bär and bjorn.

  The westbound forefathers of English were not settling un-charted territory. Even before the Romans came to Britain—Britannia to them–two thousand years ago, Celts and other tribes had already settled much of the country. With the rise of Roman rule, the Celts were assimilated, subjugated, and pushed toward the periphery. But what goes around comes around, and by the fifth century, the Roman Empire was collapsing.

  The first Germanic tribes began arriving at about the time the Romans were hightailing it out of Britain. The opportunistic mercenaries filled a power vacuum, allowing them to reap the spoils of the vacated empire and occupy much of the island’s prime farmland.3 Not that the Celts passively relinquished territory; battles and skirmishes between the Anglo-Saxons and Celts lasted for another century. The victors, if they can be called that, gradually succeeded in displacing the Celts, who settled in what we know today as Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.4 Throughout the sixth centry, more Anglo-Saxon warrior travelers continued migrating across the Channel. Over the next five hundred to six hundred years, their potpourri of tongues would blend and morph into the dialects of the Anglo-Saxon language, more commonly known as Old English. Incidentally, the spelling olde isn’t old at all. Attempting to mimic archaic English spellings, nineteenth-century advertisers stapled an e onto the end of old. The trick worked, so much so that later generations came to think of olde as a true Old English construction. (Old has taken many forms throughout the premodern history of the language—alde, auld, awld, ole and others, but never as olde.)5

  Old English was the era of Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poetry. The writing doesn’t look too familiar through twenty-first-century lenses, considering that six letters from the Old English alphabet have since been lost, and the major changes to the lexicon in subsequent centuries. Still, there’s an echo of modern English. This is a snippet from a famous seventh-century text known as Caedmon’s Hymn:

  Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard,

  meotodes meahte and his modgeÞanc,

  weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,

  ece drihten, or onstealde.

  He ærest sceop eoran bearnum

  heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;

  Þa middangeard moncynnes weard,

  ece drihten, æfter teode

  firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.

  Now we must praise the keeper of the heavenly kingdom

  The power of the Measurer and his mind-thoughts,

  The work of the glory-father; as he, each of wonders,

  the eternal Lord, established from the beginning.

  He first shaped, for the children of men,

  Heaven as a roof, the Holy Shaper,

  Then middle-earth, man-kind’s Guardian,

  The eternal Lord, afterwards created,

  The earth for men, the Lord Almighty.6

  Within this language lies the DNA of modern English, in words like: weorc (work), wundra (wonders), ærest (first), hrofe (roof), and middangeard (middle-earth).

  Journeying a
cross the Channel, I pictured a small fleet of modern-day vessels, maybe six of them, carrying the Germanic warrior travelers who would take over Britain and spawn the English language. The Anglo-Saxons looked out of place in their fur skins, sitting in leather purple chairs and sipping stale espressos. Yet there they are: Our linguistic ancestors. If not for the society they built and the language they cultivated, the way we speak, read, and spell today would be inestimably different. How many great-grandparents of English were there? Five thousand? Twenty-five thousand? We’ll never know. But their numbers were surely less than those crowding a modern-day football stadium. Estimates of Britain’s total population in the fifth century suggest around five hundred thousand people.7

  Through the ferry’s rain-streaked windows, I finally spotted the White Cliffs of Dover, looking like the face of a chalk-colored glacier. Imagine this voyage from the perspective of sixth-century migrants. They would’ve heard bits of information about Britain, but they had no way to distinguish fact from fiction. As the coastline came into focus, this new land must have looked simultaneously beautiful and foreboding.*

  During the early period of Old English, four major dialects emerged, representing the four major kingdoms of the land. But one of them began to outpace the others in terms of geographic breadth and influence. The Old English dialect of Wessex became the written standard, as much as it was possible to have a standard language in a time of clashing kingdoms and no mass communication other than books copied by hand. Because it was the nerve center of Old English writing, Wessex was the first stop on my spelling tour.

  WHEN I PROPOSED an orthography-themed road trip through England, linguist David Crystal’s reply was: “cool idea.” One of the planet’s preeminent scholars of English, Crystal has been described as a British national treasure. He has written dozens of books, some on language and many on English specifically, and he’s the go-to source for matters of language as varied as punctuation in a sixteenth-century text, the influence of Northumbrian dialect on Old English, Shakespearean rhyme, the tragedy of dying languages, and the linguistic significance of text messaging.

  I caught up with Crystal and his wife, Hilary, near Brighton, in the southern England county of Sussex. To my relief, David was not nearly as stern as his author photograph suggests. He still has the professorial air, but it’s softened by a look that makes me think of a jovial werewolf. The gray hair atop his large head is thin, but it’s long and wavy, joining up with a much thicker mane toward his ears and neck. His sideburns flow seamlessly into a white beard that’s full enough to warrant its own gloved search by airport security personnel. His large, arcing nose supports owlish glasses that magnify piercing brown eyes. The effect would produce an intimidating gaze, were it not for the adjacent laugh lines and frequent accentuation of them.

  David was a few hours away from delivering the keynote address at the Society for Editors and Proofreaders’s annual conference. Editors and freelance proofreaders are a solitary lot, but get a bunch of them together and look out. First we were treated to a round of remix poetry, in which works by William Carlos Williams and Dylan Thomas were tweaked to create a plethora of puns about grammar headaches, rambling emails from hassling authors, and stingy publishers. Then we sang along to the Twelve Days of the Schedule (pronounced “shejule” in Britain). The finale round goes like this:

  On the twelfth day of the schedule

  My client sent to me:

  Twelve sheets of briefing

  Eleven text equations

  Ten symbols lurking

  Nine sexist pronouns

  Eight footnotes missing

  Seven misquotations

  Six clauses dangling

  Five chapters more!

  Four fuzzy graphs

  Three locked files

  Two authors French

  And a typescript all neat and tidee8

  It was 10:00 p.m. before he gave his talk to the starstruck audience, but Crystal was on his game. His speech moved seamlessly from the place that holds the title of longest name on earth (Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, New Zealand), to the study of words with no repeated letters, to a discussion of word pairings, known to linguists as collective nouns, such as: “a gaggle of geese,” “a tiding of ravens,” “a body of pathologists,” and “a rash of dermatologists.”

  The next morning the Crystals and I hit the road. Hilary deftly steered the beige sedan through serpentine country lanes as we made our way to focal points in the story—or stories, as David would say—of English spelling. Surprisingly, to this American anyway, the first major act in the story of English orthography isn’t set in London. As the epicenter of British economy and culture, not to mention central command for what was once the world’s most powerful empire, it would follow that London is the linguistic incubator from which English was born. In many ways that’s true: Crucial events and people in the evolution of our language were indeed based there. But not during the Old English period, which runs roughly from the sixth through the eleventh century. “King Alfred’s Wessex was the place to be,” said Crystal. “That’s why I first want to take you to Winchester,” the town in the heart of Wessex from where Alfred built a kingdom and fortified a language.

  In the southern portion of the country, the Old English dialect of Wessex was taking off, in large part because the local literature was so closely connected to the Church. It was the monks in scriptoriums, or writing rooms, who did all the writing—sermons, poems, and official documents. They took the spoken dialects of the land and gave them life on the page. As they carried out this task, they wrote phonetically, trying to match sounds of words with letters to represent them.9 With varieties of Old English spread about the countryside, different monks making their own decisions about sound-to-letter correspondence, as well as inevitable copying errors, variation in Old English spelling was unavoidable.10 Still, sound was the principal guide for spelling, which meant the orthography of the Wessex dialect, or West Saxon, was largely phonetic. The standard was: Try to write like it sounds.11

  Monks throughout ancient Britain were busily scribing away, but the ones who most influenced the language were based at Winchester, working for King Alfred and his successors. Beginning in the year 871, Alfred became king of Wessex. In the decades leading up to his reign, the Danes had forcibly acquired much of the northern and interior portions of the island, steadily expanding southward and threatening wholesale takeover. Alfred pushed them back, thus earning the moniker, “Alfred the Great.”

  Had Alfred failed against the Danes, English may never have existed. When thinking about the history of English, the impact of such “what ifs” gets diluted by the sheer frequency of occasions when the language was in jeopardy. On the other hand, the myth of language purity can be so intractable that revisiting times when English was almost obliterated reminds us that language is not a holy doctrine. It’s more like an organism, evolving through a gradual process of accumulated accidents and narrow escapes. The same might be said of our sometimes torturous spelling system. Nudge history a little to the left or right, and English orthography may have taken a totally different path.

  Alfred’s abilities as a political and military leader were matched by his vision for education, which over the long run helped catapult English into the future. He recognized the power not just of knowledge but also of knowledge taught and learned in one’s native tongue. Lamenting the loss of linguistic heritage at the hands of the invading and book-destroying Vikings, he wrote of his desire to translate important books “into the language that we can all understand,” and of his commitment to teach “young people who are now freemen in England…how to read written English well.”

  While Latin was the language of the Church, Old English had persisted as the language of the people. But how to write it down? Some Old English sounds had no corresponding letter in Latin, which meant the monks had to improvise, borrowing the occasional letter from the local a
lphabets, and mixing them into the Roman alphabet, the one we use now, give or take a couple of letters.12 Like the spoken language of the day, the Old English writing system was in a state of flux.

  Alfred pushed for a language revival. He ordered the monks serving him at Winchester’s Hyde Abbey to translate the Bible, sermons, and legal texts from Latin into the West Saxon dialect. It wasn’t a purely altruistic policy. Bolstering religious education was an effective way, as Crystal writes, “to win God’s support for victory over the pagan Danes and to consolidate loyalty to himself [Alfred] as a Christian king.” It worked, as far as anyone can tell, and most of the surviving Old English texts are written in the West Saxon dialect, in which we find many familiar words, such as feoll (fell), god (good), heard (hard), and swurd (sword).13 Alfred’s prestige and the thriving monastery at Winchester enabled the monks of Hyde Abbey to travel the country, visiting other monasteries to share sermons and news from around the region. In so doing, they spread their preferred dialect and spellings in an almost viruslike fashion.

  Nowadays, the most visitable part of the Hyde Abbey ruins are wedged between a city park and a neighborhood of redbrick row houses along King Alfred Place. Remnants of stone walls and other structures are found alongside a stream that runs through the town. The Crystals and I walked to the barn-sized stone building at the center of the scattered ruins. On the outside, the split rocks in the flint-cobble walls glistened in the sunshine. Inside the bare single room, the air was cool and a slight breeze gently shook strands of dust-coated cobwebs.