31. Spelling (part-3)

Chaucer spelled it with a u, as indeed did most people until the end of the

seventeenth century, and some for half a century or so after that. But then, as if

by universal decree, it just quietly vanished. No one seems to have remarked on

it at the time. Bernstein suggests [in Dos, Don'ts and Maybes of English Usage,

page 87] that it may have reflected a slight change in pronunciation—to this day

many people aspirate four and forty in slightly different ways—but this begs the

question of why the pronunciation changed for the first word and not for the

second. In any case, it would be most unusual for the spelling of a word to

change to reflect such a minor adjustment of pronunciation.

Usually in English we strive to preserve the old spelling at almost any cost to

logicality. Take ache. The spelling seems desperately inconsistent today, as

indeed it is. Up until Shakespeare's day, ache was pronounced aitch when it was

a noun. As a verb, it was pronounced ake—but also, rather sensibly, was spelled

ake.

This tendency to fluctuate between "ch" and "k" sounds was once fairly common. It accounts for such pairs as speech/speak, stench/ stink, and

stitch/stick. But ache, for reasons that defy logic, adopted the verb pronunciation

and the noun spelling.

English spelling has caused problems for about as long as there have been

English words to spell. When the Anglo-Saxons became literate in the sixth

century, they took their alphabet from the Romans, but quickly realized that they

had three sounds for which the Romans had no letters. These they supplied by

taking three symbols from their old runic alphabet: w, p, and 8. The first, literally

double u, represented the sound "w" as it is pronounced today. The other two

represented the "th" sound: p (called thorn) and 8 (called eth and still used in

Ireland).

The first Norman scribes came to England and began grappling with what to

them was a wholly foreign tongue—a fact clearly evident in many of the

spellings from Domesday Book. In just one small parish in Yorkshire, Hanlith

was recorded as Hagenlith, Malham as Malgham, and Calton as Colton—all

spellings that were probably never used locally. Many such errors can be

attributed to carelessness and unfamiliarity but others clearly reflect Norman

orthographic preferences. The Normans certainly did not hesitate to introduce

changes they felt more comfortable with, such as substituting qu for cw. Had

William the Conqueror been turned back at Hastings, we would spell queen as

cwene. The letters z and g were introduced and the Old English d and v were

phased out.

The Normans also helped to regularize such sounds as ch and sh, which in

Anglo-Saxon could be rendered in a variety of ways. They substituted o for u in

certain words such as come and one, and they introduced the ou spelling as in

house and mouse. These changes made things more orderly and logical for

Norman scribes, but not necessarily for later native speakers of English.

As we have seen elsewhere, the absence of a central authority for the English

language for three centuries meant that dialects prosered and multiplied. When at

last French died out and English words rushed in to take their place in official

and literary use, it sometimes happened that people adopted the spelling used in

one part of the country and pronunciation used in another. That is why we use

the western England spellings for busy and bury, but give the first the London

pronunciation "bizzy" and the second the Kentish pronunciation "berry."Similarly, if you've ever wondered how on earth a word spelled one could be

pronounced "wun" and once could be "wunce," the answer in both cases is that

Southern pronunciations attached themselves to East Midland spellings.

Once they were pronounced more or less as spelled—i.e., "oon "and "oons."

Even without the intervention of the Normans, there is every reason to suppose

that English spelling would have been a trifle erratic. Largely this is because for

the longest time people seemed emphatically indifferent to matters of

consistency in spelling. There were exceptions. As long ago as the early

thirteenth century a monk named Orm was calling for a more logical and

phonetic system for English spelling. (His proposals, predictably, were entirely

disregarded, but they tell scholars more about the pronunciation of the period

than any other surviving document.) Even so, it is true to say that most people

throughout much of the history of the English language have seemed remarkably

unconcerned about niceties of spelling—even to the point of spelling one word

two ways in the same sentence, as in this description of James I by one of his

courtiers, in which just eight words come between two spellings of clothes: "He

was of a middle stature, more corpulent though in his clothes than in his body,

yet fat enough, his cloathes being ever made large and easie… ." Even more

remarkably perhaps, A Table Alphabetic all of Hard Words by Robert Cawdrey,

published in 1604 and often called the first English dictionary, spelled words two

ways on the title 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.