A History of English Language

A history of the english language 194
pronunciation slowly changed (see, for example, § 177). In some cases a further
discrepancy between sound and symbol arose when letters were inserted in words where
they were not pronounced (like the b in debt or doubt) because the corresponding word in
Latin was so spelled (debitum, dubitare), or in other cases (for example, the gh in delight,
tight) by analogy with words similarly pronounced (light, night) where the gh had
formerly represented an actual sound. The variability of English spelling was an
important part of the instability that people felt characterized the English language in the
sixteenth century, especially as compared with a language like Latin. To many it seemed
that English spelling was chaotic.
In reality it was not so bad as that. There were limits to its variety and inconsistency. It
varied more from writer to writer, according to education and temperament, than within
the practice of the individual. Then as now, some people were more inclined than others
to adopt a given way of doing a thing and to stick to it. Consistency in a matter like
spelling often went with a scholarly temperament. Sir John Cheke, for example, has a
system of spelling that he adheres to fairly closely. He doubles long vowels (taak, haat,
maad, mijn, thijn, etc., for take, hate, made, mine, thine), discards final -e (giv, belev),
always uses i for y (mighti, dai), and so forth. It is not our system or that of most of his
contemporaries, but it is a system, and he observed it. 3 Some writers observed a system
for a particular reason. Thus Richard Stanyhurst, attempting a translation of Virgil (1582)
in quantitative verse after the model of Latin poetry, employs a special spelling to help
bring out what he believes to be the length of English syllables. He is consistent about
spellings like thee (for the), too (for to), mee, neere, coonning, woorde, yeet, but he writes
featlye, neatlie, aptly within three lines. He is strictly speaking consistent only so far as it
serves his purpose to be. On the other hand, it is clear from the letters of such a man as
John Chamberlain, which begin toward the end of the century, that the average educated
person in Shakespeare’s day did not spell by mere whim or caprice but had formed fairly
constant spelling habits. 4 Such habits were to some extent personal with each individual
and differed in some particulars from one person to the next, but most writers show a fair
degree of consistency within their own practice. It was somewhat different with the
hastier writing of the more popular playwrights and pamphleteers. It is not always clear
how much of their spelling is to be credited to them and how much to the printer. Most
printers probably took advantage of the variability of English spelling to “justify” a line,
with as little scruple about optional letters as about extra spaces. In any case a certain
difference is to be noticed between the spelling of pamphlets like those of Robert Greene,
which we can hardly believe were proofread, and a book like North’s Plutarch or
Holinshed’s Chronicles. In one of Greene’s coney-catching pamphlets, A Notable
Discovery of Coosnage (1591), we find coney spelled cony, conny, conye, conie, connie,
coni, cuny, cunny, cunnie, while in other words there are such variations as coosnage,
coosenage, cosenage, cosnage, been, beene, bin, fellow, felow, felowe, fallow, fallowe,
neibor, neighbor, go, goe, their, theyr, and others. But in spite of all the variety that
Elizabethan spelling presents, there was by 1550 a nucleus of common practice, and
many of the features of English spelling today were clearly becoming established.
3
There were some spellings about which he had apparently not made up his mind. He writes
borrowing in three ways within a single paragraph.
4
See Appendix B.