A History of English Language

The renaissance, 1500-1650 195
That the problem of bringing about greater agreement in the writing of English was
recognized in the sixteenth century is apparent from the attempts made to draw up rules
and to devise new systems. The earliest of these, An A.B.C. for Children (before 1558), is
almost negligible. It consists of only a few pages, and part of the space is devoted to
“precepts of good lyvynge,” but the author manages to formulate certain general mles
such as the use of the final e to indicate vowel length (made, ride, hope). Certain more
ambitious treatises attacked the problem in what their authors conceived to be its most
fundamental aspect. This was the very imperfect way in which the spelling of words
represented their sound. These writers were prepared to discard the current spelling
entirely and respell the language phonetically with the use of additional symbols where
needed. Thus in 1568 Thomas Smith published a Dialogue concerning the Correct and
Emended Writing of the English Language. He increased the alphabet to thirty-four
letters and marked the long vowels. Smith’s reform did not win much favor. His work,
moreover, was in Latin, and this would further limit its chance of popular influence. The
next year another attempt at phonetic writing was made in a work by John Hart called An
Orthographie, elaborated in the following year in A Method or Comfortable Beginning
for All Unlearned, Whereby They May Bee Taught to Read English (1570). 5 Hart makes
use of special characters for ch, sh, th, etc., but his system seems to have won no more
favor than Smith’s. A more considerable attempt at phonetic reform was made in 1580 by
William Bullokar in his Booke at Large, for the Amendment of Orthographie for English
Speech. He confesses that he has profited by the mistakes of Smith and Hart, whose
works were “not received in use (the chiefe cause whereof, I thinke, was their differing so
farre from the old).” So he says, “My chiefe regard (from the beginning) was to follow
the figures of the old letters and the use of them…as much as possible.” He accordingly
invents few special characters but makes liberal use of accents, apostrophes, and
numerous hooks above and below the letters, both vowels and consonants. If his
innovations in this way had been more moderate, English spelling might have come to
the use of accents such as were being adopted for French at this time, but one glance at a
specimen page printed according to his system shows why it could not possibly win
acceptance. 6 Attempts such as the foregoing continued well into the seventeenth century.
Many of them represented mere exercises in ingenuity, as when Charles Butler, in The
English Grammar, or The Institution of Letters, Syllables, and Woords in the English
Tung (1634), substitutes an inverted apostrophe for final e’s and for
were largely wasted.
Efforts at such a radical reform as these enthusiasts proposed
5 On Hart see Bror Danielsson, John Hart’s Works on English Orthography and Pronunciation (2
vols., Stockholm, 1955–1964), a model of scholarly editing.
6 Bullokar’s Booke at Large has been reprinted in facsimile with an introduction by Diane
Bornstein (Delmar, NY, 1977).