The Mother Tongue (20 page)

Throughout this period you can find names and words spelled in many ways—
where,
for instance, has been variously recorded as
wher, whair, wair, wheare, were, whear,
and so on. People were even casual about their names. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare's name have been found, among them Shagspeare, Shakspere, and even Shakestaffe. Shakespeare himself did not spell the name the same way twice in any of his six known signatures and even spelled it two ways on one document, his will, which he signed Shakspere in one place and Shakspeare in another. Curiously, the one spelling he never seemed to use himself was Shakespeare. Much is often made of all this, but a moment's reflection should persuade us that a person's signature, whether he be an Elizabethan playwright or a modern orthodontist, is about the least reliable way of determining how he spells his name. Many people scrawl their signatures, and Shakespeare was certainly one of history's scrawlers. In any case, whether he used the spelling himself or not, Shakespeare is how his name appears on most of the surviving legal documents concerning him, as well as on the title pages of his sonnets and on twenty-two of the twenty-four original quarto editions of his plays.

Still, there is no gainsaying that people's names in former times were rendered in a bewildering variety of ways—some of which bore scant resemblance to the owner's preferred name. Christopher Marlowe was sometimes referred to by his contemporaries as Marley. The foremost printer of the Elizabethan age variously signed himself, in print, John Day or Daye or Daie. Charlton Laird in
The Word
cites a man of the period whose name is variously recorded as Waddington, Wadigton, Wuldingdoune, Windidune, Waddingdon, and many others.

An odd fact of spelling from earlier times is that although writing must have been a laborious affair there was little inclination to compress words or simplify spellings—indeed, by all evidence, the opposite was the case. Cromwell habitually spelled
it
as
itt, not
as
nott, be
as
bee,
and
at
as
atte,
and such cumbersome spellings can be found in manuscripts right up until the modern period. It seems curious indeed that people were not driven to more compact spellings by writer's cramp if not by urgency.

Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. The development that changed everything was the invention of the printing press. This brought a much-needed measure of uniformity to English spelling—but at the same time guaranteed that we would inherit one of the most bewilderingly inconsistent spelling systems in the world.

The printing press, as every schoolchild knows, was invented by Johann Gutenberg. In fact, history may have given Gutenberg more credit than he deserves. There is reason to believe that movable type was actually invented by a Dutchman named Laurens Janszoon Koster (or Coster) and that Gutenberg—about whom we know precious little—learned of the process only when one of Koster's apprentices ran off to Mainz in Germany with some of Koster's blocks and the two struck up a friendship. Certainly it seems odd that a man who had for the first forty years of his life been an obscure stonemason and mirror polisher should suddenly have taken some blocks of wood and a wine press and made them into an invention that would transform the world. What is certain is that the process took off with astonishing speed. Between 1455, when Gutenberg's first Bible was published, and 1500 more than 35,000 books were published in Europe. None of this benefited Gutenberg a great deal—he had to sell his presses to one Johann Fust to pay his debts and died in straitened circumstances in 1468—but it did attract the attention of an expatriate Englishman living in northern Belgium.

William Caxton (1422–91) was a rich and erudite English businessman based in Bruges, then one of the great trading cities of Europe. In the late fifteenth century, intrigued by the recent development of printing in Germany and sensing that there might be money in it, Caxton set up his own publishing house in his adopted city and there in 1475 he published
Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy.
So, a little ironically, the oldest publication in English was not printed in England, but in Flanders.

Returning to England and setting himself up in the precincts of Westminster Abbey in London (which explains, incidentally, why printing unions to this day use such quaint terms as
chapel
for union branch and
father
for the head of the chapel), Caxton began to issue a torrent of books of all types—histories, philosophies, the works of Chaucer and Malory, and much else—and became richer still. The possibilities for quick and easy wealth led others to set up presses in competition.

By 1640, according to Baugh and Cable, more than 20,000 titles were available in Britain—that's not simply books, but titles. With the rise of printing, there was suddenly a huge push toward regularized spelling. London spellings became increasingly fixed, though differences in regional vocabulary remained for some time—indeed exist to this day to quite a large extent. But just as a Yorkshireman or Scottish Highlander of today must use London English when he reads, so in the sixteenth century the English of the capital became increasingly dominant in printed material of all types. Although many irregularities persisted for some time, and Caxton himself could note in his famous aforenoted anecdote that a Londoner seeking eggs in nearby Kent could scarcely make himself understood, the trend was clearly toward standardization, which was effectively achieved by about 1650.

Unluckily for us, English spellings were becoming fixed just at the time when the language was undergoing one of those great phonetic seizures that periodically unsettle any tongue. The result is that we have today in English a body of spellings that, for the most part, faithfully reflect the pronunciations of people living 400 years ago. In Chaucer's day, the
k
was still pronounced in words like
knee
and
know. Knight
would have sounded (more or less) like “kuh-nee-guh-tuh,” with every letter enunciated. The
g
was pronounced in
gnaw
and
gnat,
as was the
l
in words like
folk, would,
and
alms.
In short, the silent letters of most words today are shadows of a former pronunciation. Had Caxton come along just a generation or so later English would very probably have had fewer illogical spellings like
aisle, bread, eight,
and
enough.

But it didn't end there. When in the seventeenth century the English developed a passion for the classical languages, certain well-meaning meddlers began fiddling with the spellings of many other words in an effort to make them conform to a Latin ideal. Thus
b
's were inserted into
debt
and
doubt,
which had previously been spelled
dette
and
doute,
out of deference to the Latin originals,
debitum
and
dubitare. Receipt
picked up a
p
by the same method.
Island
gained its
s, scissors
its
c, anchor
its
h. Tight
and
delight
became consistent with
night
and
right,
though without any etymological basis.
Rime
became
rhyme.
In several instances our spelling became more irregular rather than less. Sometimes these changes affected the pronunciation of words, as when
descrive
(or
descryve
) became
describe, perfet
(or
parfet
) became
perfect, verdit
became
verdict,
and
aventure
had a
d
hammered into its first syllable. At first all these inserted letters were as silent as the
b
in
debt,
but eventually they became voiced.

A final factor in the seeming randomness of English spelling is that we not only freely adopt words from other cultures, but also tend to preserve their spellings. Unlike other borrowing tongues, we are generally content to leave foreign words as they are. So when, say, we need a word to describe a long counter from which food is served, we absorb
buffet,
pronounced “buffay,” unconcerned that it jars with the same word meaning to hit but pronounced “buffit.” In the same way it seldom bothers us that words like
brusque, garage,
and
chutzpah
all flout the usual English pattern. Speakers of many other languages would not abide such acoustic inconsistency.

As time went on, many English speakers grew to feel the same way. By the end of the eighteenth century people were beginning to call for a more orderly and reliable system of spelling. Benjamin Franklin spoke for many when he complained that if spelling were not reformed “our words will gradually cease to express Sounds, they will only stand for things, as the written words do in the Chinese Language” [quoted in
State of the Language,
page 149]. In 1768, he published
A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling,
but since this required the creation of six additional letters, it can hardly be called a simplification.

People began to feel passionate about it. Noah Webster not only pushed for simplified spelling, but lobbied Congress to make it a legal requirement—turning America into the only country in history where deviant spelling would be a punishable offense.

Another enthusiast for simplified spelling was Mark Twain, who was troubled not so much by the irregularity of our words as by the labor involved in scribbling them. He became enamored of a “phonographic alphabet” devised by Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand (which Pitman called Stenographic Soundhand, thus proving once again that inventors are generally hopeless at naming their inventions).
^*

“To write the word ‘laugh,' ” Twain noted in
A Simplified Alphabet,
“the pen has to make fourteen strokes. To write ‘laff,' the pen has to make the same number of strokes—no labor is saved to the penman.” But to write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, Twain went on, the pen had to make just three strokes. To the untrained eye Pitman's phonographic alphabet looks rather like a cross between Arabic and the trail of a sidewinder snake, and of course it never caught on.

But that isn't to say that the movement flagged. Indeed, it gathered pace until by late in the century it seemed as if every eminent person on both sides of the Atlantic—including Darwin, Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, James A. H. Murray (the first editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary
), and of course Twain—was pushing for spelling reform. It is hard to say which is the more remarkable, the number of influential people who became interested in spelling reform or the little effect they had on it.

Spelling reform associations began to pop up all over. In 1876, the newly formed American Philological Association called for the “urgent” adoption of eleven new spellings—
liv, tho, thru, wisht, catalog, definit, gard, giv, hav, infinit,
and
ar
—though how they arrived at those particular eleven, and what cataclysm they feared would arise if they weren't adopted, is unknown. In this same year, doubtless inspired by America's centennial celebrations, the Spelling Reform Association was formed, and three years later a British version followed.

In 1906, the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie gave $250,000, a whopping sum, to help establish the Simplified Spelling Board. One of the board's first acts was to issue a list of 300 words commonly spelled in two ways—
ax
and
axe, judgement
and
judgment,
and so on—and to give endorsement to the simpler of the two. By this means, and with the support of other influential bodies such as the National Education Association, it helped to gain acceptance for the American spellings of
catalog, demagog,
and
program
and very nearly, according to H. L. Mencken [page 491], succeeded in getting
tho
established. President Theodore Roosevelt was so taken with these easier spellings that he ordered their adoption by the Government Printing Office in all federal documents. For a time simplified spelling seemed to be on its way.

But then, as so often happens, the Simplified Spelling Board became altogether carried away with its success and began to press for more ambitious—some would say more ridiculous—changes. It called for such spellings as
tuf, def, troble
(for
trouble
),
yu
(for
you
),
filosofy,
and several dozen others just as eye-rattling. It encountered a wall of resistance. Suddenly simplified spelling went out of fashion, a process facilitated by the eruption of World War I and the death of its wealthiest benefactor, Andrew Carnegie. Its friends abandoned it, and the Simplified Spelling Board began a long slide into obscurity and eventual death.

Yet the movement lived fitfully on, most notably in the hands of George Bernard Shaw who wrote archly: “An intelligent child who is bidden to spell
debt,
and very properly spells it
d-e-t,
is caned for not spelling it with a
b
because Julius Caesar spelled it with a
b.
” Shaw used a private shorthand in his own writing and insisted upon certain mostly small simplifications in the published texts of his own plays—turning
can't, won't,
and
haven't
into
cant, wont,
and
havnt,
for example. At his death in 1950, he left the bulk of his estate to promote spelling reform. As it happened, death duties ate up almost everything, and the whole business would likely have been forgotten except that his play
Pygmalion
was transformed into the smash hit
My Fair Lady
and suddenly royalties poured in. But, as you won't have failed to notice, this did not lead to any lasting change in the way the world spells English.