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

by David Wolman

  Greek was also held in high esteem, resulting in the addition of an h in words like throne and theater. And despite all the warring with the French, their language still managed to impress with its je ne sais quoi, which may explain why an “unhistorical b” was tacked on to the end of limb, thumb, and crumb, making them look similar to other words of French derivation—bomb, plumb, tomb, and jamb.9 Around the same time, attempts to restore etymological integrity continued, and continued backfiring, as words like sissors, coud, and ancor, were turned into scissors, could, and anchor.10 Things were getting out of hand.

  Orthographic renovation was in one sense a whim-driven fad. Yet it was also an effective way to maintain the country’s existing class hierarchy, making literacy less accessible to poorer and immigrant populations.11 To get a handle on English now required more than an understanding of the sounds that corresponded to the letters of the alphabet. You also needed a mental database of foreign-derived roots and a seasoned awareness of irregular spellings, knowledge that well-educated people had but most others didn’t. Without anyone expressly trying to make it so, English literacy was largely kept out of the everyman’s reach.

  Meanwhile, as British naval prowess, trade, and colonization expanded over the globe, words from abroad were rapidly absorbed into the English lexicon, perhaps as many as fifty thousand of them by the seventeenth century.12 Pretty much anyone who played a part in this and later eras of globalization shares a bit of responsibility for the mess of English spelling, and likewise for the beauty of English’s breadth. On the ships of the British East India Company and naval vessels, words from Hindi like guru, dungaree, bungalow, and pundit arrived into the language.13 Avocado, machete, and guitar (Spanish), bamboo (Malay), kiosk (Turkish), algebra (Arabic), parasite (Greek), cameo (Italian), curry (Tamil), and so many more, from so many places.14

  But like Caxton’s crew of Dutch printers, the people bringing new words into English had to wing it when it came to spelling. Without a common strategy for turning foreign words into English ones, approximation ruled. Curry could have been kurry, guitar could have been geetar, parasite could have been parisite or paricite. That’s not to say it was always a process of spelling alteration; in many instances, the words were unchanged or only slightly changed, and instead anglicized in the mouths of English speakers. Brusque, cocoa, gazette, intrigue, canoe.

  Yet almost as soon as the emerging Standard English acquired all this bling, sounding a little more Italian here, trying to look more Latin there and showing off its souvenirs from abroad, along came a new crop of disgruntled intellectuals. Sixteenth-century culture editors began griping about how “counterfeit” words from “other tunges” were contaminating the “cleane and pure” English of Anglo-Saxon glory days. English was spiraling into “barbarousness” at the hands of vocabulary borrowings from abroad.15 Alexander Gil, headmaster of the elite St. Paul’s School when a boy named John Milton was a student, asserted that no language “will be found to be more graceful, elegant, or apt for the expression of every subtle thought than English.”16 To keep it that way, the language needed to be purged of foreign contaminants.

  Not that that was even remotely possible. English, probably more so than any language on earth, “has a stunningly bastard vocabulary.” Somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of all the words in the OED were born from other languages.17 Old English, lest we forget, was already an amalgam of Germanic tongues, Celtic, and Latin, with pinches of Scandinavian and Old French influence as well. But in the eyes of sixteenth-century spelling reformers, this motley-from-the-get-go linguistic heritage was inconceivable, and they determined to return the language to the fantasyland of untarnished English.

  A sixteenth-century London lawyer named John Hart believed he could rescue “our inglish toung” from further abuse by way of spelling reform.18 Hart wanted to tackle the mismatch between spelling and pronunciation, and in 1569 he published a book laying out the details of an orthography overhaul. In An Orthographie, conteyning the due order and reason, howe to write or paint thimmage of mannes voice, most like to the life of nature,19 Hart says English spelling has gotten so far out of whack that writing has become “a kind of ciphering.”20 He takes issue with inconsistent ways to create long versus short vowel sounds (the o sound in moon is long, but short in foot), and he can’t stand the way we use the same letter to represent different sounds, such as the g in gentry versus the g in gather. To Hart, this inconsistency was the linguistic equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard, as were superfluous letters—or what he would have called superfluous letters—like the e in goode (good), and the second t and the e in sette (today’s set).21

  To begin his English rescue mission, Hart tried to analyze the production of sounds based on the shape of the mouth and placement and movement of the tongue. (Some of his reformer successors drew meticulous diagrams of the operations of “the vocal organ.”22) His idea was that by pinning down perfect pronunciation and then the spellings to represent it, he could once and for all weed out orthographic “vices and corruptions,” nix useless letters, and replace every last inappropriately used letter in the lexicon.23

  This audacious vision was common among Hart’s fellow orthoepists, the then favored term describing the study of proper speech and its intersection with writing. A number of academics and English elite were drawn to the puzzle of orthography, worried about the widening spelling-pronunciation gap, and were game to engineer a fix.24 Milton’s teacher, Gil, was one of them. Isaac Newton, a few years before inventing calculus, scribbled in his journal about phonetics and the prospects of a universal human language.25 Another spelling reform enthusiast, William Bullokar, published a sixty-four-thousand–word translation of Aesop’s Fables, written in one of the trendy alternative spelling codes of the time. The title, as it appeared: Aesops Fablz26

  Modern-day linguists appreciate the orthoepists. For one thing, both groups try to dig deep into the inner workings of language, from glottal stops and the descent of the larynx, to the vagaries of dialect in far-flung villages. But the more practical reason why the orthoepists matter so much to scholars today is because their work, despite its often erroneous and, as it turns out, bigoted, nature, their writings provide a window onto pronunciation of ages past.27 A 1643 guide to orthography and “the True-Writing of English,” for example, includes a list of homophones—that is, different words that sound the same. They’re not homophones to most (American) listeners today, but they were then: poles and Paul’s, eat and ate, person and parson, and room and Rome.28

  To Hart and his ilk, spelling should reflect speech, and if that meant a total rewrite of the spelling code to date, so be it. It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. Printing had only been around for a few generations, which meant the public was still relatively accustomed to variable spelling. A revised system was not only warranted, the orthoepists believed, but also possible because the existing one was in its infancy. Once people saw how these recommended amendments would pull the language back from the brink of disaster, or something equally unattractive, of course they would adopt the changes. The time was ripe for reform.

  But despite Hart’s dedication, he couldn’t muster much in the way of influential, let alone measurable, support. His scheme fell into the abyss of failed language reforms, as did Bullokar’s Aesops Fablz and other orthographic innovations. Yet Hart did hit some of the right chords as far as the future direction of the language, and not just with good and set. Fifty years after his death in 1574, many of the word constructions Hart found most loathsome had vanished. In Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) there are 1,398 instances of had and only one of hadde.29 Hart would have been happy with that.

  Even if Hart had the power to institute his rewrite of the lexicon, whose speech patterns and accents would be the model for phonetic constructions? It’s a tricky, if not impossible, question from a linguistics perspective, but to word pontiffs like Hart it was a no-brainer. The models of polite speech were and always should be the London
, Oxford, and Cambridge elite. Hart even specified that speakers of this ideal English would not be found in places like “Newcastell upon Tine” and “Cornewale,” which is to say out in the sticks.30

  Far from being an historical factoid, this specification helped pave the way for future ideas about proper English speech, grammar, and spelling. When I lived in Japan, a number of Japanese friends deliberated between studying American English, generally considered to be easier for non-English speakers to learn because of pronunciation patterns, versus the “Queen’s English,” which they, and people all over the world, consider the more elegant style of speech. They didn’t put it this way, but my Japanese friends’ message was clear: Cowboys are cool and a vacation to Las Vegas is a must. But when it comes to proper English, everybody knows that the British are superior.

  To Hart and the other orthoepists, correct English was the English of aristocrats like themselves. But their prescriptions for proper pronunciation failed to overcome an essential flaw in their plan to get everyone on the same speaking and writing page. It’s one of the same problems that haunts modern-day spelling reformers and innovative spellers on Madison Avenue and in cyberspace. That is, phonetic to whom? Is it schedule as in “shejule” or “skejel”? “Boston” or “Baastin,” “tomayto” or “tomahto”? Today, accents and dialects are generally valued as signs of regional identity, particularly in a world in which rare languages are dying out at a rate of roughly one every two weeks.31 Sure, some people look down on or up to particular accents because of associated characteristics or stereotypes. From a linguistics perspective, though, accents are never better or worse, correct or incorrect. They just are, and their inevitability has a habit of dooming phonetic-based revisions of English orthography. We can’t spell as we speak if we all speak differently.

  While Hart was preaching nouveau spelling, still more scholars focused their ire on the matter of words’ ethnic origins. Their goal was not merely to erect a fence around the English lexicon; they also wanted to raid safe houses of immigrant vocabulary and send those words packing. Opposition to foreign words was especially rowdy at Kings College in Cambridge, where a sixteenth-century Provost named John Cheke worried that “borrowing of other tunges” would gradually render English bankrupt.32 Cheke introduced new spellings under the guise of returning Englishness to English. He lobbied for changes such as eradicating many silent final e’s and implementing double a’s to indicate long-a pronunciation: aancient, waav, aag, and taap.33 And Alexander Gil continued railing against the incorporation of Latinate words and other linguistic impurities, calling them “evil-sounding magpies and owls” of unfavorable birth that only served to injure words and contaminate the English language.34

  But not all language mavens of old were quite so livid. One in particular demonstrated a more realistic grasp of the linguistic universe, while still hoping to narrow the gap between orthography and pronunciation. Richard Mulcaster was head teacher of the prestigious Merchant Taylor’s school in London. He was as neurotic about systematic stewardship of English as Hart, but his approach was one of realpolitik modification. In his 1582 treatise on education called The Elementarie, Mulcaster acknowledges inconsistencies within English orthography, but concludes that “custom” had carried regional pronunciation so far out into the ocean of lexical diversity that implementation of a wholly new phonetic system would never work. With this recognition, Mulcaster earns the title of history’s first spelling reformer who tried to balance a vision for improvement with a sense of practicality. You can’t fold or start a new game, Mulcaster might have said, but you can improve your hand.

  To make his play, Mulcaster made a list of over 8,500 words as part of his guide to teach students to write and speak properly. A complete return to the simpler orthography of Anglo-Saxon times may not have been feasible, but that didn’t mean it was impossible to rectify many contradictory spelling rules and forms.35 Like Hart, Mulcaster went after apparently needless letters and reshuffled others, but he was more selective: flag (from flagge), frog (from frogge), fin (from finn), fort (from forte), and flame (from the Middle English flaume or flaumbe).36 As it turned out, his sense of direction was just shy of clairvoyant. More than half of the spelling refinements Mulcaster made match regular spellings today, and many others differ only nominally.37 That’s not to say we spell them his way because he told us to, but the whittling he called for was on the mark.

  ONE OF THE challenges for anyone plugging for top-down spelling reform is how to unseat existing spelling practice, especially when that practice still varies from printer to printer. Say you had a good idea for changing the language, even if it was just the deletion of one letter from one word, but you just knew it was superior to other possible spellings for that word. How would you spread the word and make it stick? Maybe you’d start by composing a manifesto explaining the superiority of this new construction. But how would you broadcast it in such a way that other writers would adopt the new spelling, printers would type it and readers would come to expect the word spelled your way, over the old way, always? If you had a new idea for a rule adjustment in baseball, you could write to Major League Baseball. If you had a suggested improvement to fifth-grade mathematics instruction, you could bring it up with the Department of Education. You may get stonewalled by bureaucracy, but you know where to turn.

  Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century language shapers had no institutional authority to turn to for help in establishing a standard that was up to their standards. The French have, or try to have, a centralized, “unchallengeable” authority for their language.38 L’Académie Française, established in 1634, makes rulings about the language, and French speakers and the language are supposed to respond and behave accordingly. (The forty academy members are known as The Immortal Forty.) The Italians have an academy as well, and a few times in recent history the German and Dutch governments have made official tweaks to their tongues, most recently in the 1990s, by way of government edict. The effort in Germany caused considerable turmoil, with many influential groups and newspapers refusing to adopt the new “rules.”

  As modern English was taking shape, a handful of seventeenth-century English tastemakers looked across the Channel with envy at L’Académie Française, and set out to steer the USS English back on course by way of an academy for English. When England’s Royal Society was launched in the 1660s to direct and promote scientific research, one of its top agenda items was to try to improve the English language. It wasn’t real science, but giving it the trappings of formal investigation helped conjure credibility. The campaign would start with a committee, of course. From there, the committee would select eminent men to issue decrees about such-and-such aspect of the language that would then become the final word.

  One man who was ready and willing to take on this responsibility was the distinguished poet-playwright-essayist John Dryden, whose body of work included the tragedy “Tyrannick Love” and “Aurengzebe.”*39 Dryden outlined an argument for an academy to help fix the language in place. Falling back on the favorite descriptor of the age, he lamented that English had descended into a “barbarous” state because there was “not so much as a tolerable dictionary or a grammar” anywhere to be found. Like many intellectuals, Dryden revered Chaucer, and worried about mutations in the language that had taken place during the roughly 250 years since The Canterbury Tales had been written. Parts of the masterpiece were already difficult to comprehend, and Dryden blamed language change. If English continued to morph willy-nilly, the great works—perhaps Dryden’s included—faced future incomprehensibility and thus obsolescence. That was, unless the captains of English could set an anchor.40

  Putting aside for a moment the impossibility of locking any language in time and form, Dryden’s idea faced an additional hurdle: William Shakespeare. The Bard had, and would continue to have, a catastrophic effect on efforts to impose order on the language. Together with his contemporaries of the late 1500s and early 1600s, Shakespeare went ballistic with l
inguistic experimentation. There was a pyrotechnic playfulness with which Shakespeare and other writers broke rank from language constraints. He was, as he put it, a “man on fire for new words,” wielding and augmenting the lexicon with equal mastery.41

  Shakespeare is credited with coining more than two thousand words, infusing thousands more existing ones with electrifying new meanings and forging idioms that would last for centuries.* “A fool’s paradise,” “at one fell swoop,” “heart’s content,” “in a pickle,” “send him packing,” “too much of a good thing,” “the game is up,” “good riddance,” “love is blind,” and “a sorry sight,” to name a few. Dryden, quilling some fifty years after Shakespeare’s heyday, detested language change and decried the drift from Chaucerian English. He seems to have been oblivious to, or in denial of, Chaucer’s own playfulness with the language of his day, while turning a blind eye to colossal changes brought about by Shakespeare.

  By the time Shakespeare was writing, the majority of English spellings were either settled or were on their way to being settled. In that sense, Shakespeare can’t really be considered a member of the nuclear family of spelling reformers. But he had a huge impact on orthography. For one thing, his lexical innovations further stymied the quest for stability. If the boundaries of Standard English weren’t blurred enough already, all the new words, usages, and expressions springing from Shakespearian and Elizabethan English only made the reform more challenging. He also usurped Chaucer as the gold standard. On a post-Shakespearian earth, his name would forever be associated with English of unparalleled sophistication and elegance.

  For a drink in the Bard’s honor, David and Hilary took me to The Dirty Duck, their favorite watering hole in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. “Language is people,” Crystal told me as we stared out at the River Avon. Words are not the flesh of thought entirely, for we also think in pictures, sounds, tastes, smells, and feelings. But words are an essential part of the flesh of society and cultural intercourse. They are products of human innovation, folly, power, preference, and change. For that reason, correct English is nothing more than a phantom. That doesn’t make English any less expansive and glorious, but the idea that there is clearly a right or a wrong way to go about the business of pronunciation, grammar, or even spelling, flies in the face of language’s true machinations.