Spelling

We discussed spelling reform at pub night last night.  

You really want to come to our pub night.  We also talked about Gettysburg and Fred made his joke about the cunning linguist for the sixth time.  He just can't contain himself.

You may have known that cniht was pronounced k'neecht, the ch as in Scots Gaelic loch. Knight. No longer a good spelling, but here we are.

In terms of English spelling many of you already knew that scribes who wrote in Latin or French applied conventions from their own language to English and printers from the continent did not always have good command of English, leading to the use of gh for that raspy throat sound more common in German (hoch) or Scots Gaelic (as above) or adding an h to c or s to represent an English sound that hadn't a letter. ch, sh.  

The Great Vowel Shift occurred just before the growth of printing and the conventions of that became messy, because the vowels moved around in the mouth and what was considered a long vowel and short vowel changed with it.  This gave us all oo, ai, and all manner of ei and ie. U wasn't even it's own vowel until then, but quickly became four sounds: super, mute, put, putt. That brought in all the ou, au, ui, eu confusions. 

There were attempts at standardisation in the 1500s, but they were largely ignored. Printers did what they wanted and things calmed down a bit without intervention.  But regional variations persisted and people were stubborn about it. Imagine that.

There is an influence on change that is largely overlooked. King Charles tried to keep a lid on things in the 1630s by not calling any Parliament for over a decade, but with the Scots and the French and the damn Puritans, military money was needed. The Star Chamber dramatically censored printing in 1637 because there was a lot of information that they did not want in circulation, especially about the troubles with the above. During the religious quarrels leading up to the English Civil War in the 1640s, the nobility had a longer and longer list of complaints, Charles had an increasing need for money, and secrecy.  Good luck with that.  But to do this he needed Parliament, which increasingly opposed him. Even his allies in the nobility had had it. He called a Parliament but it didn't do what he wanted, so he disbanded it after three weeks - the Short Parliament. The Scots attacked and decided to settle in in the north, hovering around and looking like they might head to London. Now Charles really needed money to pay them off, so he called another Parliament and this one - the Long Parliament - lasted two decades.  One of the first things it did was execute his major counselors.

Yes, I know we haven't gotten to any spelling yet.  We are just about to. The Long Parliament disbanded the Star Chamber, and all its acts became null. Printers poured into London and put out pamphlets, broadsides, and what might roughly be called newspapers. They provided up-to-date reports of battles, sometimes in only a day. This speed was previously unheard of. Prior to this time, such reports were printed with justified margins , which looked elegant and nifty.  But to justify margins printers added in letters, so that three words in a line might have an -e at the end, no longer pronounced but recognised, or a doubled consonant as in magicall or grass. This slowed down spelling standardisation quite a bit. 

But with speed now of the essence readers cared less about elegance and printers just spelled things the way they thought they should.  Even better, they spoke English rather than Dutch or French as their first language.This only fixed about 10% of the problem, but it  was something.