Hello everybody, my name is William Caxton, the famous printer - you have already heard of me in the lecture (for more information click >here<.

In the picture above you can see me at work. But hard work it is, indeed. Now I have this outrageously modern printing machine, which I brought to England all the way from Bruges (Flanders). But how shall I print the bl**** texts. When I look at the manuscripts that I am given, I almost crack up. The spelling ... the spelling, it is messy, so messy.

Well, my dear Anglo-Saxon forefathers had a minimum standard for writing at least, but nowadays everyone spells his words after his own fashion. I am not postmodern, am I. If I can't set some standard for spelling, I'll really have a rough ride. All of those different dialects, people coming from different parts of the country all pronounce the words of our English tongue in a multitude of different ways.

And then those French scribes. Well, what good did those scribes do to English spelling. Nothing – they messed it all up. My guru, the famous poet, "the worshipful fader and first foundeur and embelissher of ornate eloquence in our Englissh", Geoffrey Chaucer, was right when he added the following words to the epilogue of his marvellous Troilus and Criseyde:

And for ther is so gret diversite
In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge
So prey I God that non myswrite the,
Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge.

Well, dear Geoffrey, I’ll give it a try although I am "indigne and unworthy ... to bere penner and ynke horne after hym." Since the language spoken in England is so variable and so rapidly changing these days, future generations of printers, writers, and scholars will still have a lot of work to do to develop a decent, uniform orthography.

What? Do you really think I am exaggerating? Well then, great master of standardized Modern English, try to handle this tutorial and you’ll see that the spelling of English was really quite different and variable at my time.

Spelling is defined as the ordered set of letters or other written marks to form a word. The basis of spelling is a given writing system. Being in essence a social matter of linguistic convention, spelling is subject to language change as any other dimension of linguistic analysis.

In a great many (literate) languages meaning is not only articulated through speech but also visually represented by means of a writing system or script. A writing system consists of a given set of written marks together with a given set of conventions for their use (Sampson 1985: 19). When the writing conventions are standardized (generalized and uniform) one speaks of orthography.

The set of individual distinctive units of writing are known as graphemes - in alphabetic systems they are simply called letters. In linguistics, graphemes (or letters) are conventionally discussed by placing them in angle brackets: < >. As you know from different fonts or handwriting, a grapheme can appear in thousands of different physical variations, i.e. different forms. Thus < e > can be realised as e, E, e, e, and so forth. These individual realisations of a grapheme are known as graphs. Thus, the distinction runs parallel to the phonetic distinction between phonemes and phones.

Given the alternative symbolisation of meaning in terms of a spoken or a written code, the form side in the Saussurian notion of 'symbol' can be attributed a bipartite structure.

While speech is the primary form of symbolisation, writing is secondary.

Two basic types of writing system can be distinguished in terms of how they map meaning onto graphemes. Logographic systems, such as the Chinese script, represent units of meaning (morphemes). Systems of the second type, called phonographic, are designed to represent speech sounds (phonemes).

The alphabetic system is a phonographic system in case. Obviously, English writing also employs an alphabetic system.
An ideal alphabetic writing system follows the phonographic principle of phonemic spelling: it attempts to establish a 1:1 relationship between sounds and letters.

Modern Finnish comes very close to such ideal correlation. Normally, however, it is impossible to establish a precise correlation between phonemes and graphemes. Usually the set of phonemes outnumbers the set of letters. One solution to solve this problem is the use of diagraphs, i.e. two letters (sometimes more) represent one phoneme.

Further difficulty arises due to mismatches between sounds and letters. On the one hand, the same sounds can be represented by different letters or letter combinations, on the other, the same letters (letter combinations) can have different different phonemic values.

Modern English or Modern French, for instance, are notorious for their highly irregular spelling. Some historical linguistic reasons will be mentioned below.

Word spelling is subject to change, but why? Since phonographic systems are, in essence, designed to represent speech sounds in a written format, these secondary systems are themselves influenced by changes in pronunciation and phonology. Moreover, the set of spelling conventions – or orthographic rules – that guide the mapping from sounds to letters (and vice versa) play an important role in the process of transforming combinations of sounds into combinations of letters.

Apart from the (partial) matching relationship between writing and speech, spelling changes can be caused by adapting the set of graphs, i.e. by introducing new graphs or dropping old ones. Thus, three different causes for spelling change can be listed.

Modifications in the set of graphemes or digraphs used

Modifications in sound are reflected in writing

Modifications in spelling /orthography
(the transformation of sound sequences into combinations of letters changes)

All three dimensions of spelling change can be observed in the transition from Old English to Middle English spelling.

Old English was first written in the runic alphabet (cf. Lecture 3). With the arrival of Christian missionaries from Ireland, the Roman alphabet was introduced. These scribes used the so-called insular script. To represent some Anglo-Saxon sounds five additional graphemes were introduced:

Later in the Old English period, English possessed a standard written form, which was based on the dialect of Wessex (cf. Lecture 3). Before the Norman Conquest, English was in fact the only modern European language to do so at that period, because Latin was predominantly used for written purposes elsewhere. The Wessex literary standard fulfilled the phonographic principle by embodying a set of spelling conventions that involved an approximately phonemic orthography. (One can pronounce Old English almost as it is written if one knows the phonemic values of the individual letters, cf. Tutorial 2.)

After the Norman Conquest, there ceased to be a written English standard for about 200 years. Therefore, writing in Middle English was highly influenced by dialectal spellings. (You can compare this to writing SMS messages in Swiss German. Although the messages are comprehensible (because they are based on phonemic spelling), there is no standard, no rules about how you have to spell your Swiss German words.)

The opening passage from The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in the English language (circa 1473-1474) by William Caxton.

Moreover, the distinctively Anglo-Saxon symbols gradually disappeared after 1066, because the French scribes introduced their own writing systems and spelling conventions. Due to these changes, English spelling became less phonemic, although Middle English can still be read – more or less – as it was written. Let us hear what William Caxton says about some of these novel conventions.

Hello, it is me again, William Caxton. Well, lets us have a look at some of the spelling conventions introduced by the Anglonorman scribes.

Some of these guys had such a strange writing when scratching down characters like <m>, <n>, <i>, <u> and <v>. All these letters were formed with a sequence of vertical strokes. So <luminis> would have resulted in a sequence of nine such strokes, which makes it rather unreadable. They knew about this problem and it is named the minim confusion.

Furthermore <u> and <v> were not distinguished graphically. This made it extremely difficult to idetify some of our English words such as <luve> (ModE. love), <tunge> (ModE. tongue) and <cumen> (ModE. to come).

Now, the scribes had overcome these reading difficulties by introducing a couple of spelling conventions. <m> was usually replaced by a small stroke (macron) over the precedent letter. With regard to <u> and <v> the Norman scribes introduced the convention to replace <u> by the letter <o> whenever confusion was possible. So the spelling of our ME <love> is a result of this scribal convention. But we still pronounced it with this luvely /u/.

Compare the Old English version of our passage of the Bible with the Middle English one. I mean, I really want to print the Bible, but I want to do it in a systematic way.