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

by David Wolman

Entering the building, David rubbed his forehead, as if trying to slow the torrent of words, derivations, dialects, texts, and historical events rushing through his brain. “You have to ask: Why did so much of the East Midlands dialect become the standard for what then became Standard English?” he said. The Old English that developed farther south during the reign of Alfred had been crushed by the Norman invasion. As new versions of English sprouted throughout the countryside, what lifted one above the others?

  Chaucer is only part of the answer. The expanding sheep-wool industry catalyzed a great deal of trade, both economic and linguistic, between the middle part of the country, London, and eastern port towns. “So as they went east and south, the people of the Midlands brought with them their way of talking and writing,” Crystal explained. Meanwhile, the academic enclaves of Oxford and Cambridge, also in this middle-ish part of the country, were focal points of linguistic growth and cross-pollination with words from French, Latin, and other languages. French still held sway, but English, no longer viewed as the vulgar third-rate tongue, was beginning to infiltrate the classroom.

  And with a bang it infiltrated the Church. To successfully bring God to the everyman, a fourteenth-century preacher named John Wycliffe felt the Bible should be translated from Latin into English. From an ornately sculpted pulpit in St. Mary’s of Lutterworth, he dared to suggest that the Pope’s word (No English in my church!) might not be identical to God’s word (Love thy neighbor).* The Crystals led me toward a glass case near the church entrance. “This is it,” said David, tapping the glass. Below were two thick, ever-so-fragile-looking books opened to a middle page revealing colorful drawings and lines of handwritten text. The label next to them read: “Two volumes which comprise the first translation of the entire Bible into the English Language, completed about AD 1380 by John de Wycliffe, while Rector of this Parish.” The translations are, in the words of the church, “blessings which God bestowed on the English people by this earliest version of the holy scriptures in their mother tongue.”

  The idea of translated Bibles was unpopular with the Church’s top brass, as democratizing religious reforms tend to be. Yet Wycliffe charged ahead. He was later condemned, but the linguistic impact of this first English Bible was irreversible, and rapid dissemination of copies helped catapult what is known as the East Midlands dialect of Middle English into pole position as standard language of the land and of the future.

  The Church was able to reassert the superiority of Latin for a little while, but soon other translators picked up where Wycliffe left off, most famous among them William Tyndale. In the sixteenth century, Tyndale was smuggling English editions of the Bible into England from Antwerp, until he was ambushed by authorities and burned at the stake for heresy and treason. His last words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s Eyes!” But again, the influence outlasted the man. Roughly 80 percent of the wording in the first King James Bible (1611) is the same as that used in Tyndale’s edition.8

  Wycliffe’s Bible gave an essential boost to the East Midlands dialect, and may have even influenced some of Chaucer’s work and words.9 The vocabulary of the Bible isn’t as impressive as that of The Canterbury Tales, although some words do make their debut in Wycliffe’s translation: communication, injury, envy, novelty, birthday, madness.10 Then again, like Chaucer, Wycliffe had limited direct impact on spelling; tectonic orthographic shifts loomed just around the corner, and both men were still writing at a time of considerable spelling variation. Wycliffe’s Bible was rife with variable spellings like counseil/councel, stod/stood, chayer/chaier, shal/schal (for shall).11 The key here, though, is that Wycliffe and Chaucer are essential players in the wider story of English spelling because there’s no such thing as a spelling standard without a more standardized language. That standardization gets under way during the period of Middle English, and two of the most significant forces shaping Middle English were John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer.

  A third force that helps cement Middle English and accelerate the development of more standard spellings is the Chancery court at Westminster. This was the civil service office handling many of the legal affairs of the kingdom. Through drafting, copying, and dispatching formal orders and writs from the king’s court, these scribes spread words across the country in written forms that they, and really their bosses, saw fit. They had a keen interest in consistent orthography: it improved comprehensibility with audiences speaking various English dialects, and also imbued documents with legal and formal authority.12

  They certainly had their hands full. Before the late Middle English period, receive, for example, can be found as receve, rassaif, recyve, receyf, and in no less than forty other iterations. People can be found as peple, peopel, pepulle, and many other forms, just as church took the shape of cirche, kirc, chyrche, and chrch, among others.13 Crystal points out the dearth of scholarship into the precise influence of the Chancery scribes on English and its spelling code, but it’s clear that a number of spellings were settled by this crew of government administrators. The word shall, formerly schal or even xal, was given its modern form by the Chancery wordsmiths, just as bot became but, thise became these, and seide became saide.14 Convention was emerging, but that didn’t mean the scribes were shy about deliberately using some older and decidedly nonphonetic spellings—high, though, nought, slaughter, while also, and probably inadvertently, continuing to use a number of variable spellings, such as lowely/loweli, any/eny/ony, and which/wich.15

  AS THE CRYSTALS and I wandered around St. Mary’s inspecting fading frescos and discussing the Catholic Church’s backlash against English after Wycliffe’s gutsy translation, we came to a peculiar architectural detail, the squint. A rectangular hole in the wall alongside the main area for seating, behind which lies an additional row of pews, the squint’s purpose is unknown. One hypothesis is that while Mass was under way in the sanctuary, another service might have been held in this smaller side chapel. Through the squint, people could keep an eye on what was happening in first class. Another possibility is that this auxiliary area was for lepers and other village outcasts. Outsiders were permitted to watch the service, but only from a safe and segregated distance.

  Sometime after poking my head through the squint, I realized that my journey with the Crystals was having a reforming influence on me and my thinking about what it means to be a poor speller. What was coming into focus was not only the gap between language and spelling, but also the chance-ridden history of English orthography. People communicate ideas through language, whereas spelling, as Chaucer, Wycliffe, and the Chancery scribes must have known, is only the tool for encoding the language, and an imperfect and shifting one at that. Spelling decisions weren’t random, but they were human, carrying all the folly, inconsistency, bias, and creativity that goes with that territory.

  That English is such a mutt of a language only served to make the resulting spellings that much harder. Old English had already been borrowing from, and interbreeding with, Dutch and Latin before the Norman invasion. The arrival of Norman French opened the floodgates for more linguistic mixing and orthographic variability. After a few centuries of French rule and language, Middle English received a huge boost from Chaucer, Wycliffe, and the Chancery style.

  Yet as widely disseminated and lasting an impact as their writings had, their words still only reached audiences by way of handwritten manuscripts. But not for long.

  FOUR

  PAGE SETUP

  “Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren.”

  from William Caxton’s 1490 Prologue to his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid

  THE RECTANGULAR IRON CASE holding the words looked heavy in the man’s outstretched hand, like a gold bar. He used two round dog-skin leather tools with wooden handles to apply the ink. I was sitting in the demonstration room at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, along with a dozen schoolchildren wearing Puma and Vans sneakers, blue jeans and sweatshirts. We were watching a museum staffer operate a replica
of a fifteenth-century printing press.

  One of the bigger students, thirteen or fourteen years old, volunteered to pull on the thick, two-foot-long lever that pushes the paper down onto the raised rows of inky type. The boy put his foot up on the side of the press for leverage, then leaned back and pulled with all his might. The staffer displayed the freshly printed page and the boy’s classmates applauded politely.

  No one ever applauded for Johannes Gutenberg until late in his life. His invention sparked sweeping changes to civilization as we know it: government, science, religion, language and, yes, spelling. Ideas—explosive ideas about, say, religious reformation or democracy—had a mobility they never could have had in the centuries of scriptorium-produced books. The Internet is quite something, but so far it can’t add anything like “spawned the Enlightenment” to its résumé.1

  Gutenberg was from a well-to-do fifteenth-century family that had inherited a bunch of real estate. Yet his father was looked down upon by the neighbors in Mainz for not working for a living, and, perhaps more so, because he mismanaged his assets and struggled to stay in the black. Preparing for the possibility that he might have to work, young Johannes decided that learning a trade skill was in his best interest. He worked as a goldsmith at the mint, where he mastered the art of metallurgy.2 Over the course of more than a decade, Gutenberg melted countless batches of metal, pouring it into molds where, after partially cooling, the unfinished coins would be ready for engraving. During those years at the mint, Gutenberg must have sketched in his mind his futuristic device.

  Someone else would have come up with it, eventually. By the fifteenth century, the public appetite for books was pushing the copying capacity of scribes to the limit. Stories about faraway lands (Marco Polo’s exploration of Asia); interest in current events (the Black Death); and an ever-expanding market for the Bible all added to a widespread hunger for knowledge. The Renaissance was coming, but there was no way to mass-produce books and share new information, until suddenly there was: Within forty-five years of the invention of the printing press in the late 1440s, some ten million books would be printed.3

  Gutenberg was famously secretive about the device he spent twenty years perfecting, nervous that someone might steal his idea.4 He had no patent laws to protect his intellectual property and his invention was uncomplicated enough that it easily could have been copied. But when it came time to open a business, Gutenberg didn’t have the capital to proceed. He sought out loans, first from his brother-in-law and then from a local lender. Fiscal mismanagement was in his genes, though, and as the costs for his early printing efforts mounted, Gutenberg couldn’t keep up.

  In the end, Gutenberg’s downfall had nothing to do with knock-offs. Just as he was finally printing and selling some books, his business partner lost patience and took him to court. The famous inventor’s debt led to a lost lawsuit and the forfeiture of his printing press, workshop equipment, and a bulk of whatever money he’d earned from sales. Late in life, he was recognized for his achievement by the Archbishop of Mainz, and even received a small award. But the goldsmith who made coins for a living before inventing one of the most important devices of the millennium spent much of his life battling debt.

  Yet history has been kind to the father of the printing press. Nobody really remembers Johann Fust, the business partner who sued Gutenberg. We remember and honor the inventor and the impact his “Werk der Bucher” (work of the books) had on humanity in the 550 years since.* The Chinese had come up with a method for printing one thousand years prior, but the brilliance of Gutenberg’s creation was the moveable metal type that allowed typesetters to disassemble text letter by letter after printing, for reuse in the next composition. The use of metal was also a breakthrough. Previous printing technology used wood blocks for type, which warp over time.

  Before the advent of printing, spelling was erratic. How could it not have been? Monks in scriptoriums scattered throughout the countryside and working in near isolation were hired to copy texts for individuals or institutions. There were no set spelling rules and no notions of correctly written English. On the contrary, the monks likely tried to write in a way that would best cater to the dialect and familiar spellings of a particular client. The point was to make that book readable, not to invent a spelling system for all books.

  Chancery scribes introduced some conventions, but it was printing that led to a settled orthography. Mass production meant that printers began the gradual process of deciding on a single spelling for a word, or maybe a few variants, and weeding out the rest. This was still well before anything we would identify today as a house style, which is publishing-industry speak for “the way we do things,” with things being spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Spellings in printing houses of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were a function of each printer’s interest in economical completion of the task. How does one spell a word? Just like you did the last three times. The process of settling spelling wasn’t sudden, but Gutenberg’s invention marked the beginning of the end for unbridled English orthography.

  The demonstration at the Gutenberg Museum was a helpful primer and gave me a chance to pay homage to the man and his invention. But the museum staffer skipped over the essential step, so far as spelling is concerned: letter selection. I wanted to know what life and work were like for the men operating the early presses, constructing the words and composing the text of the first printed books. In Europe’s earliest printing houses, those men held our orthographic fate in their hands.

  A FEW TRAIN connections later and I stood in a cobbled square outside the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. The founder of Plantin Press, Christoffel Plantin, had come to Antwerp from Paris sometime around 1549 with designs on learning the trade of bookbinding. Soon after his arrival he was attacked in what was apparently a case of mistaken identity, and one of his arms was permanently damaged. Plantin no longer had the dexterity required for bookbinding, but he could pull the lever of a printing press. So he started a publishing business, first called Du Gulden Passer (The Golden Compasses), and later Plantin Press. For the next three hundred years, it was one of the most successful and esteemed printing houses in Europe. The stone and brick building facing Vrijdagmarkt Square was both the family home and the production workshop. Today it houses the two oldest printing presses in the world and a priceless collection of antiques, tapestries, paintings, and of course, books.

  Guido Latre walked briskly to greet me. He’s a short man with round eyeglasses and a mostly bald head. Latre grew up in Flanders, where he earned money to pay for his first visit to England by digging up World War I copper fuses on his family’s farm and selling them as souvenirs to British visitors to a nearby war cemetery. “I couldn’t speak English, but I memorized the sentence: ‘Want a souvenir, sir? It’s one hundred Belgian francs.’”5 Today, Latre is Professor of English literature and culture at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, and he knows the Plantin-Moretus Museum inside and out.

  We started in the production area, a ground-floor room lined with presses along the wall. Opposite them were cases full of “type,” small metal blocks (called bars) with one side bearing a letter molded in relief. The setting felt like a factory without machines. “We’re still centuries from the industrial revolution,” said Latre. “Yet this was really industrial-scale production.” In the time it would have taken a monk to make a single copy of the Bible or The Canterbury Tales, the seventy or eighty employees at Plantin, printing four, sometimes even six, pages a minute and on multiple presses, could produce a few thousand copies. Books went from being expensive treasures to something an everyday person could buy with a week’s wages. Ideas, and the words encoding them, were reaching more people than ever.

  The atmosphere inside workshops like that of Plantin Press had a direct influence on modern-day spelling. “Try to imagine the pressure in this room,” said Latre. While one man worked the press, another man, the “compositor,” stood by the case full of letters and rapidly composed
rows of text. The cases are long rectangular trays with dozens of divided sections, each filled with small metal letter blocks.

  Every case was organized based on the frequency of a letter’s use. The larger, capitalized letters were used less often, and therefore stored in the upper section of the tray, and vice-versa for the non-capitalized, or lowercase, letters. This sectioned layout was an internationally recognized standard, and although typesetting is now an obsolete craft, the language of the trade is still with us; it’s where we get the terms uppercase and lowercase, and a family of one size and style of type was known as a font.

  The compositor’s job was to pick out the type and set it into the chases, those rectangular trays holding the lines of text. He was laying out the words letter by letter, most likely copying from a manuscript (written in whatever language) set in front of him. He would have encountered countless inconsistencies of spelling, in different manuscripts or even in the same manuscript, but there was no rule or system in place for addressing matters of spelling. On the contrary, shop employees were paid by the page, which meant the men running the presses would have had little time for slow compositors deliberating over their compositions. “Remember,” said Latre, “a good printer is pressing multiple pages a minute.” When it came to spelling, “they could not afford to have the patience of a monk in a scriptorium. Publishing was no longer a cottage industry,” which meant “no one bothered with the niceties of local dialects,” and there was little consideration for orthographic consistency or lack thereof.

  As if working fast didn’t make the job stressful enough, there were other challenges too. The type was tiny, some letter bars were small enough to fit comfortably inside a thimble. The typesetters also had to create a mirror image of the text, from right to left, so that the press would transpose normal text onto the page. In addition, compositors and printers needed to neatly align their margins. From the sixteenth century through to the present, printed pages were seen as more elegant and formal if the left and right margins were straight and uniform, as you can tell from the book you’re now holding. Printers trained compositors to carefully fill out their lines, fiddling with words to get them to fit. Adding or axing a finale on the end of a word was an effective way to even out margins, with apparently little or no cost to legibility or aesthetic.6