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Anglo
Saxon
  History of English
  The key to its spelling

INTRODUCTION BY DR. STEVE BETT
..........

 
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OLD ENGLISH MANUSCRIPT


English is a difficult language to spell because of a series of events which altered the way it was approached--our orthography went through stages and our pronunciation went through somewhat independent stages, so that today things are pronounced one way, but spelled another.  Because of this, we must learn to spell--while children who speak many other languages need only place the letters they hear on the page, since for them all words are spelled exactly as they sound, spoken precisely as written.  It is not so in English.  references & links

English has not always been this way.  In the 10th Century, words were written exactly as they were pronounced.  West Saxon English was over 90% phonemic. Each letter had a specific sound, with a very few letter combinations creating unique sounds (most of these involving the letter "h", as in PDE[present day English] ch, sh, gh, th).  As you wrote the word, you represented each sound with a letter on the page; when you read it, you reproduced the sound of each letter in sequence.  Two t's were different from one, two consecutive vowels were each pronounced, whether the same. Double consonants generally indicated a short stressed vowel as in butter and kicker. If there was an [e] on the end of a word, it was pronounced. 

We know this is so because of some of the work of those who spoke this language.  Chaucer, specially, is known to have commented on this.  In his poems, he would often rhyme an English word to a foreign word, especially something French or Latin.  He complained in writing on one occasion that the spelling of his scribes was atrocious--but he attributed this not to some failure in their education or upbringing, but to the fact that they did not pronounce the words as he did--a serious matter for him, since the way they spelled the words, representing the way they spoke them, the words didn't rhyme. 

This is very important to the story:  Chaucer perceived the letters on the page as a representation of the sounds which would be made by the speaker; he did not expect that his readers would pronounce words he wrote in their own way, but in the way they were written, and so he required that those words be written as he spoke them.

In the 14th Century, Chaucer [p. 76, The Story of English]  commented on the 

      "…grete dyversite in English and in the writyng of our tung."

By 1800 one type of diversity had been effectively abolished but the diversity of ways to spell a particular sound has remained. We can no longer use a [y] for the /ai/ in "diversity" but we can still use this letter to represent the "long I" or /ai/ in other words such as "fly". English spelling was standardized (at the word level) but it was never regularized. 

Although they lived less than 100 years apart, the pronounciation of Chaucer's English and Shakespeare's English are radically different.  The spelling, however, is almost the same. 


ONE - won or wunn or wan?

West Saxon for 'one' was 'ane' with long A [aan@] That is also where we get modern English 'an' from.  Long A is th normal Old English antecedent of modern long O, as in 'bat'  (pronounced 'baat') > 'boat' (Cf Fr. 'bateau' [= 'boat'], The original length behind 'one' survives in 'only',  'alone' (= al one) and 'atone' (= at one).

one - ane [aane] pronounced aanah in Middle English [onne]

History my explain how English came to be spelled the way it is but it is not really a key to learning how to spell words according to the dictionary.  Instead of being a single code, it is at least six different codes.  This makes 60% of the words in the language unpredictable. Computers have no problem with standardized spellings but writers do.  It is usually easy enough to reduce a given pronunciation to five or six possible spellings but nearly impossible to determine which of the alternatives apply. 


History of Spelling
Valerie Yule on the History of Spelling
Old English links http://www.library.adelaide.edu.au/guide/hum/english/E_Old.html

OE Alphabet http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/courses/handouts/oealpha.html

The Saxon Alphabet
no j or v, which were alternate forms of i and u
ae dh and th were at the end of the alphabet
p was wynn or W.  there were two y forms.

Listening along with old English is a revelation
Words are pronounced exactly as they are written
And they are understandable  usually

http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/Guide.Readings/PracticeA.html
Old English website http://www.bluerider.com/english/old_eng.htm
ie  stierde  http://acunix.wheatonma.edu/mdrout/GrammarBook/Sounds/stierde.html
sound file saved as html? 

Old English pronunciation and spelling  http://www.furman.edu/~wrogers/phonemes/phone/oe/

Most editors use macrons (a horizontal bar over the top of a vowel) to indicate vowel length. A "short" vowel is one without a macron. A long vowel is indicated by a macron. Macrons do not appear in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.

Old English Pronunciation Guide
A short a is pronounced like the Modern English "o" sound in "contact":manegum
long a is pronounced like the "a" sound in Modern English "father: *am
ae # is pronounced like the "a" sound in Modern English "cat" or "bat": f#der
E short e is pronounced like the "e" sound in Modern English "bet": betra
long e is pronounced to rhyme with Modern English "way": we
I short i is pronounced like the "i" sound in Modern English "his": his
long i is pronounced like Modern English "ee" in "feed": rices
O short o is pronounced like the "o" sound in Modern English "pond": ond
long o is pronounced like the "o" sound in Modern English "go":gedon
U short u is pronounced like the "u" sound in Modern English "bull": ungel#redum
long u is pronounced like the "oo" sound in Modern English "school":sculan
u umlaut is an i with pursed lips.
Y short y is pronounced like the "i" sound in Modern English "will": wylle
long y is pronounced like the "oo" sound in Modern English "school," but with the lips pursed
y umlaut is an i [ee]
EO long e + o is pronounced thus heofon.  hayofaan
IE short i + e is pronounced thus ahielde.  aahaylda
EA short e + a is pronounced thus healf.  hayulf

CONSONANTS

c can be pronounced either as a hard "c" sound, represented in Modern English by "k," or as the sibilant that is represented in Modern English by "ch." Thus cyrran demonstrates the hard "c," and ceosan demonstrates the sibilant. Some editors indicate the sibilant pronunciation of "c" by putting a dot above the consonant.

chayosan  cheosan  sibalant

cyrran  cue-ran  trilled r  Q-rran  hard c  kyuurran

h is never silent. It is pronounced with a bit of a throat-clearing sound, like the "ch" at the end of Scottish "loch" or German "Bach": dryhten. "H" also is used in combination with the "semi-vowels" "r," "l," and "w" in ways not familiar in Modern English: hlaford, hronr#d, hw#t.

kwaet?  not whaet

PARTS OF SPEECH

Nouns: "A noun is a person, place or thing" is a rough definition of nouns. Nouns are naming words. King, Alfred, crown, kingdom, power are all nouns.

 Verbs: "Verb: That's what's happening." Verbs are action words. Ruled, wears, carries, to wander, fought are all verbs.

 Pronouns: Pronouns are used in place of nouns. He, she, it, who, whom, that, which, we, they, us are all pronouns. (Note: In Old English we are going group words like this, that, these,andthose,and a, an, and the with the pronouns. We'll call them all "demonstrative pronouns," though grammarians would probably call them "articles," and linguists would identify them as "determiners").

 Adjectives: Adjectives are words used to describe nouns. Royal, golden, lofty, powerful, hardy, strong are all adjectives.

 Adverbs: Adverbs are words used to describe verbs or adjectives. Slowly, steadily, angrily, powerfully, and very are all adverbs.

 Prepositions: Prepositions are short explanatory words that indicate things such as location, direction and possession: with, to, under, over, by, for are all prepositions.

 Conjunctions: Conjunctions are connecting words: and, but, or, nor are all conjunctions.

Sh, gh, ght

sc is pronounced like Modern English "sh": scip.

h was something like kh,
gh was the ME spelling change
liht became light pronounced leecht
through  was thruh    thruukh

cild = child but could be a hard c as well  cyning

To someone learning English, the spelling of words such as light or through may (reasonably) make little sense, as many letters are not pronounced. This is because the pronunciation changed, but the spelling did not. In Old English, liht (light) was pronounced [lee:xt], with the h sounding like the ch in Bach. In Middle English, the pronunciation didn't change a whole lot, although the spelling was somewhat altered. The gh in light used to denote the same ch sound as it did in Old English. There are lots of examples of this, as you can imagine.

Chaucer's pronunciation is not the same as today's but it is quite consistent with the Saxon alphabet.
a=aa, o=awe, oo=awe, er='r, terminal e's are usually not pronounced. f=v, ff=f.  -s=z
Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400)

Whan that April with his showres soote 
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote, 
And bathed every veine in swich licour, 
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr; 
Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth 
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne, 
And smale fowles maken melodye 
That sleepen al the night with open yë -- 
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages -- 
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, 
And palmeres for to seeken straunge strondes 
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes; 
And specially from every shires ende 
Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende, 
The holy blisful martyr for to seeke 
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke. 

 Chauser [in progress] Saxon transcription

Wen that appril with his shaurz sot
The drot of March haeth pierst tu the ruut
And beithd evvry vein in swich licor
Av wich vertiu engendrd iz the flour
Wan Zefyrus eek with hiz swiet breth
Inspird hath in evvry holt and heth
The tendr crops, and the yong son
Hath in the Raam hiz haalv cors ron
And smal foulz maaken melody
Thaet sleepen aal the nait with open ie
So priketh him Nachr in hir corajes
Thann longen folk to gon on pilgrimajez
And palmeres for tu sieken stranj stronds
Tu fern hal.., cuuth in sondry londs;
And specially from evry shirz end
Ov Engelond tu Caterbuiryu they went
The holy blisful maarter for to siek
Thaet him hath hopen whaan thaet they wer sek

------------------------------------------

Why did the pronunciation of English change?
The following explanation is provided:  It was the combination of three events which changed the way English-speaking people viewed--and learned--their own language.  They are listed here in no particular order.  See Valerie Yule on the History of Spelling  See 1600Spelling

Shakespeare
The first of those was the work of Shakespeare.  "The Bard" wrote prolifically and emotively and creatively, and left a stamp on the world of English unlike any writer before or since.  In his time, it was still the case that words were pronounced as they were written, written as pronounced--not at all the way we pronounce them today.  Although it was probably not his intention to write something which would last the ages, his works and his words were revered, and preserved with great accuracy--not, indeed, as the Masoretic text of the ancient scriptures, but with something of that attitude.  They were viewed as great and important writings, which to change would be paramount to sacrilege.  And they didn't have to be so preserved for so long, for the next event was close at hand. 

Printing Press [Caxton] 1450-1530 
The second was the invention of the printing press.  Printing captured language in a form more fixed than it had been before; it did so for two reasons.  First, the use of printing plates meant that the preservation of the written word no longer depended on the life of a single sheet of paper.  Now what was written was nearly etched in stone--it was recorded on a rack of metal letters and reproduced hundreds, possibly thousands, of times on many sheets of paper.  Printers who had what they considered important or valuable pages would often save them so that they could rebuild the rack and reprint them later--and sometimes would save the rack itself, so that they could print more at need.  Suddenly, more people were exposed to far more written material than ever 
before, more began reading, more began writing.  There was an explosion of written communication.  But also, words were no longer recorded on the page by carefully educated and trained scribes and monks.  They were recorded on the page by technicians--people trained in the use of the new technology.  A scribe will read--or hear--a word, and then write the word.  He writes it the way he spells it--in those days, the way he said it.  But a technician will not rely on his own meager abilities to tell him how to spell.  He will copy the work before him exactly as it appears.  Thus the words of Shakespeare were printed the way he wrote them, and, in the main, 
continue to be so printed, despite the fact that perhaps not a single word (perhaps "O!") is pronounced as it was.  And these words to some degree became standardized:  if you spelled a word as it was spelled by The Bard, it could not be wrong, and it could not be misunderstood. 

Tthe King James Bible. [1611]  Earlier versions
There were other influential English bibles [Wyclift 1388, Tyndale 1525] but none as popular as the KJV.  It was the first "modern committee translation", that is, the first time a group of scholars were gathered to compare multiple copies of the ancient text to determine what the original words must have been, the first time several experts in the ancient languages had to agree on the correct translation of each passage.  For this methodology, it deserves great praise. Unfortunately, they had no means of dating their documents or understanding the concept of "text families".  In their New Testament work, they had five complete copies of the Greek.  Four of these were all copies of the same earlier version, and the fifth, far older and far more accurate, was often overruled by comparison to "the majority" of available authorities.  The inaccuracies are not in any way heretical; but they are unacceptable to the modern scholar.  (This is complicated by the fact that the meanings of many words used by those scholars have changed. 

One need look no farther than the concept of the Holy "Ghost".  To them, a ghost was not more nor less than a spirit being; to us, it is invariably a haunt, the spirit of a departed person which fails to rest.  As a child, I once imagined that the "Holy Ghost" was the ghost of the dead Jesus, and that somehow Jesus was alive again, but that because he died and his spirit remained here, that was his ghost--nonsense, but a good illustration of the confusion which results from teaching children in another language which seems so much like their own.)  But it was not the historical, theological, or scholarly influences of the King James Bible which made the difference.  It was its impact on education. 

Spellbound - excessive reverence for the traditional writing system

Very quickly, the King James Bible became revered above the writings of Shakespeare; by the beginning of the 20th century, it was in many quarters revered above the ancient texts of which it was intended to be a translation.  Parents read it to their children; and they taught their children to read from it.  Nary a jot nor a tittle would be altered for centuries:  the text was holy, the words were sacred, and no change could be tolerated. Words would be spelled as they were spelled by King James, or they would be wrong. 

But English was still a young language undergoing transitions.  Centuries before, the Angles had conquered the Celts, and the two languages melded into a new tongue; then the Saxons brought their Germanic words, which created what we call Anglo-Saxon.  In 1056--not at all so long ago in terms of language history--the Normans conquered.  These Normans spoke French--although not exactly the French of Paris; The Normans were descendants of the Norsemen who attacked France. 

Their social structure was built on the concept that the world was immeasurably large, full of places to conquer:  the eldest son would inherit his father's lands and castle, and all other sons would go out into the world and conquer their own lands and build their own castles.  But the peace treaty with the kings in Paris prevented them from taking more of France; so from Normandy, Anjou,  and Brittany, they attacked England--and infected the tongue of the natives with their hybrid French/Norwegian language. 

You had a composite language which still included many sounds from many languages.  It may be that English is the most eclectic language spoken.  It took many years for it to become the language we speak. 

But as books became more basic to our lives, new concepts were developed.  Webster published a dictionary--in part because he believed that Americans should record the correct way of pronouncing and spelling their own language.  The transistion was made:  there were now correct spellings and correct pronunciations, and to speak or write otherwise was to be ignorant and uneducated.  It was now possible to teach spelling as a subject, because there were correct answers to the obvious questions. 

By the mid 1800's scholars came to realize that our language was something of an anomaly.  Language did not remain the same from generation to generation.  Speakers were lazy; they slurred sounds into different sounds, eliminated those which were too difficult.  At the same time, they mispronounced things for hearing them incorrectly.  In the days when people were geographically isolated, languages would diversify as local speakers listened to each other and took their cues on grammar, pronunciation, and structure from each other. 

In China, the language fractured into dialects so diverse that they would be considered different related languages--much as the romance languages of Europe--were it not for the common almost hieroglyphic orthography which held together the structure.  That is, throughout China, the same symbolic representations had the same meanings, and they were written in the same order to form sentences with the same grammatic structures; the fact that the words were pronounced so differently as to be entirely unrecognizable from one part of the land to another did not alter the ability of all to communicate on paper.  The same would have happened in the English-speaking 
world, but that the English were extremely mobile--through their empire, they constantly sent those who spoke the current version to be respected governors of their provinces throughout the world, and the current version of the language was so promulgated to all; the American version did not have time to divert adequatelyPro from its sire before the next step in technology--radio--created a tendency toward universal agreement in pronunciation, as the printing press had in spelling. 

  But linguists recognized that language was fluid, constantly changing; and that the primary way language changed was through the "mistakes" of its speakers, the tendency of localized and isolated groups to invent their own way of speaking.  Suddenly, the usage of the undereducated was as valid as the usage of the educated; it became socially incorrect to suggest that someone spoke incorrectly--he only spoke differently. Today, you cannot as a teacher teach a child that he speaks improperly.  His grammar, pronunciation, syntax, and vocabulary are all learned from his family, and therefore representative of a valid version of the language. He uses it to communicate with those in his neighborhood, those in his life--whether it is "Black English", "Valley Talk", or any of a number of other "dialects" which approach incomprehensible to those outside the community, it must be regarded as "correct", because it is the language learned by those people, a segment of the 
English-speaking population. 

REFERENCES AND LINKS 
 

ss in a nutshell
spanglish -1
spanglish -2


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Dethless Verses
"  Valerie Yule 1991, 1997
(there are ilustrations to acompany these)

 The Profetic Bard

Brethes there th man with brain so ded
He never to himself hath sed
"This spelling's bad!"
Whose hart has ne'er within him burnd
When he hath seen poor children turnd
Both sad and mad?

If such there be, go mark him wel,
I bet that even he can't spel
If truth to tel.

(I think this poem ends with the pterified speller plunging to endless
night.)

Eye have a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques for my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea
I've run this poem threw it
I'm sure your plea's too no
It's letter perfect in it's weigh
My chequer toiled me sew

Hamlet's Ghost

TO SPELL AND HOW TO SPELL:  That is the question,
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous customs,
Or to take arms against this set of troubles,
And by reforming, end them.   To spell with rule,
No mor, and by this simpl means we end
Th hed-ache and the thousand litral shocks
Our young ar heir to . . .  Just to improve -
Aye - there's th rub,
For if we spel with sense, what scools may do
When we hav shufld off this ancient coil
May giv us pause.  There's odd respect
That makes calamity of common sense . ."

On first looking into spelling reform

Much hav I traveld in th relms of ink,
And many awful spellings hav I red,
On meny lists my memry has been fed,
Which few can spel or read, so few can think.
        Never of eny hope wer students told,
Which bold eccentrics held as their demesne,
(A word I can't pronounce, tho spelt and seen)
Til I herd Lindman*  speak out loud and bold.
        Then felt I like some worm within a book
when metamorfosis comes in its ken,
Or like stout Cortes, when with eagl look
He lernt the Spanish alfabet, and all his men
Red Spanish wel, and every glance they took
Fonetic - bannd for our dum Englishmen.

* Or Pitman or Godfrey Dewey or eny of them.

Burns Night

"Some hav books but cannot read   (because they've English spelling)
And some coud read but hav none (poor countries with sensibl spellings)
Give them some books, and us reform,
We'l read and write and a', mon."


You must read the book Frindle, by Andrew Clements. Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books. It's an easy read, full of laughs and creative insight-a book to get your students thinking about the joy of words.

P.S. Last summer I was given the Hovde Family Spelling Book. Published in 1927, it had been passed from one to the other of the six children in my mother's family as they attended the Swea School near Camrose, Alberta. The book is a heritage treasure to me as I envision the rows of pig-tailed little girls and grubby-overalled little boys who studied from it. The book is dog-eared, tattered, discolored, marked up, underlined, and well-used. Scribbled on the inside front cover is a verse, not much different from what one might find nowadays: The more you study, the more you know, The more you know, the more you forget, The more you forget, the less you know, So why study?

Introductory notes to the teacher say, "Society looks upon the ability to spell words correctly as one mark of an educated person. To have perfect spelling in all pupils' written work should be the aim. Nothing less should satisfy you or your pupils."

Preceding the 62 pages of Word List for the Grades, the following is given: "Children of any grade should be able, by the end of the year, to write perfectly all the words in their own grade list or in the lists of any lower grade."

Sources of Information

Spelling Links, Reflections on Spelling and Its Place in the Curriculum, edited by David Booth, 1991, Pembrooke Publishers.

Spelling Through Phonics, by Marlene J. McCracken & Rabert A. McCracken, 1996, Peguis Publishers.

A Guide to Children's Spelling Development for Parents and Teachers, by Mary Tarasoff, 1992, Active Learning Institute.

Spelling for Parents, by Jo Pheonix & Doreen Scott-Dunne, 1994, Pembrooke publishers Limited.


 
Index

Links

What has a hippo in common with a feather?
R. Beard on historical linguistics
 
Language Variation and Change
by Sarah Thomason (U Pittsburgh). Language families, language variation, types of language change.
 
HEL Website
Devoted to the history of the English language
Bibliography of Pidgins and Creoles
 
Take Our Word for It
"The purpose of this site is to introduce you to some basic ideas behind etymology...
and to pique your curiosity to learn more about the origin of the English language."
 
Edo Nyland's Home Page
Introduction to linguistic archaeology.
Old English Pages
Info on Old English, the language of Beowulf (from Georgetown University).
Labyrinth Library: Middle English
Links to info on Middle English, the language of Chaucer.
Buber's Basque Page
One of the most well-known language isolates.
 
 

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