4 Miles Walker, The History of English Spelling 



peep at old English spelling as it was before Dr. Johnson 

 petrified it. I shall ask you to drag- down the curtain and 

 burn it, not merely as a useless drapery but as a most 

 disgraceful imposition, which has cost us untold millions to 

 maintain and which has been and is to-day the greatest 

 impediment in our educational system. 



The root principle in English spelline (as indeed in all 

 European spelling) is phonetic : to represent consistently the 

 spoken word by written signs. When teaching a child to 

 read, this is one of the first principles that we try to inculcate. 



The early English writers followed the principle very much 

 more closely than we do to-day. They laboured, however, 

 under very great difficulties, — difficulties very much the same 

 that beset us to-day. 



Early difficulties in Phonetics. 



While certain of the consonants, such as B, P, and T, stood 

 for perfectly definite sounds, there were others which stood 

 for more than one sound ; and this necessarily led to some 

 confusion. The letter C had two distinct origins and two 

 distinct sounds. One of the C's came from Latin with the 

 bulk of the other letters. In that language it was used 

 instead of K, which was missing from the alphabet. In late 

 Latin the sound of C changed before the vowels e and i; in 

 old French it was sounded like S. The Norman French 

 brought this soft C into our language, and so we have two; 

 and to this day people don't know which is which. Many 

 of the early writers, in order to avoid confusion, used K for 

 the sound of K, but continued to use a C in words of French 

 origin containing that letter. 



The letter G not only had the hard sound as in " get " and 

 the soft sound of J but did duty for two other sounds as well. 



Similarly F and H had varying values. 



But the main difficulty was with the vowel sounds. We have 

 a large number of vowel sounds and only five or six letters to 

 represent them. Attempts were made by the use of digraphs 

 (combinations of vowel letters) to get over the difficulty, but 

 there was never any agreement as to the sound denoted by 

 each digraph. If in the thirteenth century there had been 

 founded an Academy with authority to decide on the par- 

 ticular symbol to be used for each sound, all would have been 

 well ; but there Avas no such Academy and so each writer had 

 to make the best use of the symbols that he had. 



One very sensible thing the early English writers did. 

 The Romans had no sign for the sound of " th " in " thing, ,r 



