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 1 475 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 zo,000 titles were available
in Britain—that's not simply books, but titles. With the rise of printing, there was
suddenly a huge push towards 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 towards 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 1 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 "buffet." 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.