6 Miles Walker, The History of English Spelling 



method of writing vowels, while more consistent 2 in itself, was 

 not the same as our method ; for instance, long O (as in host, 

 ghost, post) was often written OO by him (hoost, goost, 

 poost). Similarly, the long sound of E (as in meat, seen, 

 clean) was written often by him as in mete, sene, clene. 

 A few lines from " The Canterbury Tales " will illustrate a 

 number of interesting points in this connection. We have, 

 for instance, the words mete, depe, kepe, clene, sene, grece, 

 semely, speken, wepe. Chaucer's metre shows that the final 

 e was very often silent. 



At mete wel ytaught was she withalle, 



She leet no morsel from hir lippes falle, 



Ne wette hir fyngres in hir sauce depe. 



Wel koude she carie a morsel and wel kepe, 



That no drope ne fille upon hire brist ; 



In curteisie was set ful muchel hir list. 



Hire over* lippe wyped she so clene, 



That in hir coppe ther was no ferthyng sene 



Of grece, whan she dronken hadde hir draughte. 



Ful semely after hir mete she raught. 



And sikerly she was of grete desport, 



And ful plesaunt and amyable of port, 



And peyned hire to countrefete cheere 



Of court, and to been estatlich of manere, 



And to ben holden digne of reverence. 



But for to speken of hire conscience, 



She was so charitable and so pitous, 



She wolde wepe if' that she saugh a mous 



Kaught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde. 



There was a change in English orthography from a fairly 

 phonetic form in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to less 

 pure spellings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the 

 sixteenth century in particular the spelling of a large number of 

 our words seems to have been distorted in the most unjustifiable 

 way by the introduction of all sorts of consonants and double 

 vowels. The writers of the time seem to have been seized with 

 an absurd fancifulness. One might almost imagine that they 

 regarded this distorted spelling as an indication of scholar- 

 ship. It is in a measure through this want of scholarship on 



2. Even Chaucer was not perfectly consistent, the vowel e stood for two 

 sounds (nearly = Fr e and e) and o stood for two analogously related sounds. 

 Further, he did not represent any of these four sounds uniformly- 



