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

by David Wolman

  Many printers of the earliest English-language texts were not native English speakers, and some of them may have known very little English at all. Look once again to the first lines of The Canterbury Tales, “When April with its sweet showers”:

  Whán that Apríllé with hise shourés soote

  The droghte of March hath percéd to the roote,

  And bathéd every veyne in swich licóur

  Of which vertú engendred is the flour…

  In some texts, April was written “Aprille,” and his represented as “hise,” even if, as Crystal explains, “[t]he metre suggests that there is no-e pronounced in Aprille and hise, but that there is one in shoures—‘shoor-uhs’. But people disagree over whether soote was ‘soht’ or ‘soht-uh’ [meaning sweet]. A foreign compositor would get the impression that final-e was random, and that he could put it in or leave it out as he wished.”7 Translation: Spellings that were close enough were good enough.

  Employees at Plantin and elsewhere in the sixteenth century also probably gave us the h in words like ghost and ghastly. The Dutch spelling convention for a comparable sound was written as gh, so the typesetters superimposed their spelling preferences onto the words they were constructing, just as scribes of Norman-occupied England had done.8 For a while, girl (gherle) and goose (ghoos) were h-ified as well, but those modifications, for whatever reason, failed to stick.9 Precisely how many spellings of modern English trace back to these anonymous compositors and their alterations, we can never know. But language historians agree that between irregular spellings that were settled in the lexicon by printers, as well as spellings that shifted because of an error or layout requirement, early printing houses are a major factor in the story of English’s convoluted spelling code.

  It’s doubtful they ever thought about it in such terms, yet consider the power these typesetters had. Authors were obviously shapers of orthography, especially those who wrote or translated the most popular books of the time, namely the Bible, The Canterbury Tales, and the story of King Arthur. But it was the typesetters who delivered words to readers in this new and incomparably authoritative-looking format. Print. If some or all of the printers had used s and h to represent the sound sh in every text they ever worked on, they could have done so, relieving future generations of the headaches induced by the likes of nation, sugar, fissure, tenacious, and charade. If they’d wanted to, or needed to for layout purposes, they could have nixed the final-e from hundreds of other words. The effects of such alterations remind me of the words of Mark Twain, who as a young man worked as a typesetter: “The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a larger matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”10 He was talking about careful diction, yet this sense of profound consequence spilling out of a seemingly subtle shift also applies to spelling. In this case, the independently small but cumulatively significant impact printers’ adjustments, deletions, and substitutions had on our language.

  THE FIRST BOOK ever printed in English was published by a British merchant named William Caxton in 1475, give or take a year. The book was Raoul Lefèvre’s tales of the Trojan War, Le recoeil des histoires de Troyes, and Caxton translated it himself—all seven hundred pages.11 The landmark publication took place with no (known) fanfare in the Belgian town of Bruges. This was a century prior to Antwerp’s rise as a printing center, and it was Caxton, before any person on the planet, who first had to squeeze English’s diverse dialects, vocabulary, punctuation, and spelling into accessible, printed prose.

  Modern-day Bruges is in many ways the same compact medieval city of canals and step-gabled brick buildings it was centuries ago. But the chocolatiers, weekend marching bands, and boats filled with tourists belie the city’s past as a bustling center of commerce.12 During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Bruges was a nexus of international trade. Any number of languages could be heard within the city walls, as businessmen bought and sold goods, especially Flemish cloth, that would then be shipped to ports throughout the Continent and west to England.

  After growing up in the southeast of England, Caxton apprenticed in London with a successful textiles merchant.* Sensing opportunity abroad, he decided to move to Bruges for a bigger piece of the action. He established an export business that would ultimately keep him away from England, mostly in Bruges, for the next thirty years. But he also spent some time in Germany, which is where he first learned about printing.13

  As a savvy and well-traveled merchant who spoke many languages, Caxton would have had to have gone out of his way not to see Gutenberg’s invention as a killer business opportunity. After purchasing three presses, he set to publishing his translation of Lef èvre. His customers were the local elite, English envoys, and nobility back in Britain.14 The book did well, or at least well enough, and he soon moved back to England to set up shop near Westminster Palace. He brought with him his presses and a handful of trained printers, presumably some of the same staff he had hired in Bruges. One of them, the marvelously named Wynkyn de Worde, went on to become one of England’s most successful printers.

  The atmosphere in the Westminster shop was one of frenzied excitement, perhaps comparable to that of a twenty-first-century tech start-up. Caxton possessed a technology no one in England had ever seen, and he had every reason to believe that books were going to impress and sell like crazy. Eager to maximize the efficiency of his operation and gain an edge over other publishing upstarts vying for a piece of the London market, Caxton worked to streamline the printing process by introducing a smaller type than had been previously used.15 By 1480 he had published The Canterbury Tales, Le Morte d’Arthur, and a number of other works, assuring his position as the country’s preeminent printer. When he died in 1492, Caxton had nearly one hundred published titles to his name.16

  Caxton knew that he wouldn’t be able to tame the dragon of English orthography; he would be lucky to keep it in a cage. “[C]omyn englysshe,” he wrote, “that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother.”17 When he wrote the word right, for instance, the chosen spelling corresponds to pronunciation of that period, which was more like “richt” (rhymes with “picked”). Caxton was approximating, though, for there was no established way to capture the sounds of words phonetically. “Certainly,” he wrote, “it is hard to please every man by cause of diversity and change of language.”18 The word might alone has more than twenty variable spellings during this period of English evolution, including myht, mihte, micte, and myght.19 As chief decider, Caxton had to shoot from the hip, knowing that while spelling could not be completely controlled, he was, in effect, seated at the controls.

  Through verbose prologues, Caxton downplayed his power and tried to demonstrate humility. (Long prologues were common in those days, and the humble tone was meant to help sell books.) His de facto spelling policy, Caxton explained, was to record the “common terms that be daily used,” preferring language that can be understood to “the old and ancient English.” As he and other pioneering printers settled for best-estimate representations of spoken words, they in turn helped to crystallize spellings before anyone could really grasp that it was happening.20 Yet readers who may have puzzled over how to pronounce Caxton’s right didn’t know how good they had it. The crevasse separating the sound of words from their written form was going to get wider still.

  Caxton probably had little patience for matters of spelling. He was already busy translating, showing off his products to the king, and dealing with his employees and customers. As a result, his books include plenty of variable spellings. Is it booke or boke (for book), goode or good, wyf or wyfe (for wife), hows or hous (for house)? Caxton didn’t say, and instead commits countless acts of orthographic flip-floppery, sometimes even on the same page of text.21 The business of printing, after all, was about margins of pages and profit, not orthography dogma.

  It would be another couple of generations after Caxton’s death before spellings would truly settle, but the process began w
ith his work, and some of his decisions, about spelling and about how to run his press operation, left a long-lasting imprint on the language. One historian suspects it was Caxton himself who transformed gost into ghost, in light of the fact that so much of his life was lived among Dutch-speaking and-writing people, but no one can say for sure.22 However frequent they might have been, these word alterations were not problematic in and of themselves—it was their inconsistency that drove a deeper wedge between English spelling and pronunciation. If we always made the sound of a “g” with the letter combination of gh, that would be mildly inefficient, but at least it would be a regular rule that people learning English could easily follow: ghastly, ghosts, ghettos, and aghast. But no such luck. We also have gas, goat, get, and against, to say nothing of gentle and gnarly, finger and single.

  The gh at the end of many modern words, however, like dough, cough, and trough, is actually an artifact not of Dutch orthographic tendencies, but of Norman distaste for the Middle English letter yogh, which looked like this: 3. Yogh fell out of use around the end of the fifteenth century. At the time when Caxton began printing, the Middle English alphabet had another letter, the thorn, which looked like this: Þ. But thorn didn’t exist in German or Latin, which were the languages of the letter cases in Caxton’s Western Europe orbit. There must have been a moment when Caxton, realizing there was no thorn available, decided to use the t and h in combination to create the Þ sound. As professor Latre told me: “Caxton lost the beautiful thorn in Bruges.” Just like that, a letter, gone.*

  In addition to changes in lettering, there was a major pronunciation upheaval under way, which took place in an unusually compressed period of time, between Wycliffe’s Bible and Caxton’s first books—less than one hundred years. Scholars call it the Great Vowel Shift. No one knows what caused it, but the pronunciation of vowels in thousands of words underwent a relatively sudden change in quality. Whereas name was once pronounced like “nom” (rhymes with “bomb”), after the Great Vowel Shift it was and still is pronounced with a longer a, as in game or aim.

  “There would have been grandparents and grandchildren who had trouble communicating with each other,” Crystal told me. Listen to the different vowel sounds in child/children, clean/cleanly, and hide/hid.23 Pronunciation was changing while many spellings remained anchored to the older forms. Why wasn’t the spelling system amended to try to keep up with this new way of speaking English? “Because no one knew the pronunciation change was happening!” said Crystal. People didn’t wake up one morning and notice that it was partly cloudy outside with a strong southwesterly breeze of shifting vowels. To people of medieval England, the process was natural. The English of Caxton’s era was already a moving target, which meant pinning down an optimal and universally intelligible form for every word was a losing proposition. Publishing readable enough editions of bestselling texts, however, was very much a winning business proposition.

  Caxton’s spelling decisions, writes one author, did more to “regularize Standard English than his bestselling author, Chaucer.”24 While visiting Bruges, I stopped at a number of museums and cafés to ask people if they’d ever heard of Caxton. No one had. Not that Belgians should be blamed for failing to know about the first English printer, but for some reason I was wishing they did.

  The printed pages coming off of Caxton’s workshop presses gave people who could read English new and more material to consume. For one cross-section of society, that meant new opportunity to contemplate language and its relationship not just to knowledge, but also to cultural identity. Almost as soon as a more settled English orthography began spreading far and wide on the pages of printed texts, pundits began exhorting the importance of proper writing, and about the need for untangling the spelling code.

  FIVE

  VALIANT EXTERMINATORS OF DIALECTICAL VERMIN

  I honor the Latin, but I worship the English1

  Richard Mulcaster

  BY DAY’S END, THE Crystals and I had traveled some 160 miles through 500 years of English language history. From King Alfred through to Caxton and the advent of printing, we had covered, roughly speaking, Old and Middle English. “Now, if you want to blame people for spelling irregularity,” said Crystal, “the next group is the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century scholars and spelling reformers.” Between 1500 and 1750—from the arrival of printing to the publication of the first great dictionary—the English we now recognize as standard took shape. With it came something called correct spelling.

  When linguists talk about language standards, they mean widely accepted conventions that facilitate smooth and easy communication, be it spoken, written, or signed. In short: norms. But during this next period in the evolution of English, something happened that had little to do with a scientific accounting of communication, and everything to do with culture and power. The guardians of England’s class system co-opted the legitimate linguistic meaning of Standard English and transformed it into “correct English,” a version of the language written and spoken as they saw fit. Over time, right and wrong ways to write and speak became indicators of education and class, distinguishing “us” from “them,” the “haves” from the “have nots.” In time, as more printed books circulated within the population, educated men began studying language, and in doing so found something they could obsesses over and tirelessly opine about: Words. Before long, they began spewing judgments about correct usage, grammar, speech, and spelling.

  An ethic of accurate writing is at least as old as Æ

  ´lfric and his tenth-century warning that careless text is equivalent to great evil. But correct English, and especially correct spelling, really only became a concern after the forces of printing helped establish a de facto standard language, and even then it was only the well-to-do who cared. Yet the arbiters of style did more than concern themselves with the state of English—they began copyediting it. When Caxton was working on his draft of Le recoeil, none other than the sister of the King of England suggested a red-pen change or two. He swiftly made the recommended corrections. If those edits conflicted with his sense of orthographic style, Caxton didn’t say. Smart move. If you want your books to sell, best not to be on bad terms with the sovereign’s sister.2

  Yet without dictionaries, manuals, laws about language or the sister of the king ruling on every last word, against what measure would people assess the accuracy of words, spoken or written? A standard can’t really exist without a certain degree of uniformity, and in the late Middle English period, the language still hadn’t reached that level of widespread consistency.3 English was undergoing a simultaneous upheaval and growth spurt in a relatively short period of time, with the Great Vowel Shift, a steady influx of word borrowings from French, Norse, Latin, and other languages, and changes wrought by the process of putting words to printed pages.

  In the eyes of the men who saw themselves as stewards of culture and discourse, someone had to do something to end this lexicographical madness. “When people in the 1500s got turned on to Standard English,” said Crystal, “spelling was really their top concern. Why? Because one would expect to see spelling idiosyncrasies in handwritten books, but not in printed texts.” Everywhere they looked, language pundits found their countrymen mishandling the mother tongue. So they took matters into their own hands, hunting for linguistic blemishes, disagreements, and aesthetic horrors, and setting out to remedy them.

  The first wave of deliberate spelling modification was the campaign to make words look more sophisticated, which at the time meant look less English. Phonetically inconsistent spelling wasn’t much of a concern for this early generation of reformers—not nearly as much as etymology. English had regained respect thanks to the likes of Chaucer. But its renaissance was clipped, or at least delayed, by The Renaissance. A new era of science-and reason-minded scholars and writers felt a special affinity for Latin and Greek, sources for all of those cool new words, like astronomy, politics, erosion, gravity, and insect. At the same time they held steadfast to a
lesser opinion of their native language. English, wrote essayist and philosopher Francis Bacon, will “play the bankrupts with the books.”4 Its perceived awkwardness and limitations, he believed, hindered intellectual endeavors. To minimize this effect, the more Greek or Latinate words or parts of words one crammed into one’s writing, the more scholarly the final product.

  As early as the fifteenth century, scribes and early printers performed cosmetic surgery on the lexicon. Their goal was to highlight the roots of words, whether for aesthetic pizzazz, homage to etymology, or both. The result was a slew of new silent letters.5 Whereas debt was spelled det, dett, or dette in the Middle Ages, the “tamperers,” as one writer calls them, added the b as a nod to the word’s Latin origin, debitum.6 The same goes for changes like the b in doubt (dubium), the o in people (populous), the c in victuals (victus), and the ch in school (scholar). Schedule, formerly sedule or cedule, was converted into the annoying schedule, again because of a love of Latin. In other cases, a misguided attempt to group words believed to be of similar origin led to spelling alterations that were confusing and etymologically incorrect. Rime or ryme acquired an h to make it look more like rhythm, and delit morphed into delight to bring it into line with right and night.7 This was also about the time when island acquired an s, to make it look more like the Latin, insula.*8