Alphabets and Early Writing Systems
Christian missionaries, along with church officials, brought in an alphabetic writing system based on the Roman alphabet in the 600s. Incantations, poems, and curses, were written in an early Germanic writing system and came from the same system as the Roman alphabet.
Early Spelling from Roman Alphabet and Anglo-Saxon
The early alphabet which began with the Roman Alphabet, sounded different, and was never modified for writing English. Early monks would write using Roman letters, gradually adding in new characters to deal with the extra sounds. Consonant sounds were added using runic characters to the alphabet. These characters would be replaced with digraphs in the medieval period.
Early Orthography and Standardisation
When words are written regularly and consistently with an alphabetic character, they're called orthography. During the Anglo-Saxon period words were never classed as complete because they took time to develop. There is no correct spelling during this period, which is always required in standardisation. Cultures with alphabetic writing require a lot of practice and analysis to master and separate the speech string. These clusters of vocal gestures come from the individual segments of a speech string in consonants and vowels. Syllables are read and written by means of marks on a page.
Reading enables a person to become more familiar with commonly used words, than words not seen before. Manuscripts were normally read out loud, instead of internally by the reader, making the process slow. Taking longer for the peruser to master the system.
Over time the use of the Roman Alphabet representing Anglo-Saxon began to decline. Written representations of the language were changing leading to greater disparities of both written and spoken language. With dialect variations popping up depending on where the scribe came from. A popular place was Wessex, where many of the scribes resided, and featured their own local pronunciations, affecting the characters they wrote. Which greatly helps today's historians when looking for clues as to the origins of the manuscript.
Today modern readers use the closest representative form for each word when translating the text.
During this period manuscripts were normally written using quill pens, ink and writing surfaces such as parchment (prepared sheepskins), or the more expensive vellum (calfskin). This didn't change for 800 years. Alongside Winchester, which was the royal court, other centres of learning and government arose, and included York, Peterborough and Jarrow.
After the Norman Conquest
Spelling was greatly impacted by the Norman conquest, and this was because the English court was French spoken and written. Bringing in a number of French loanwords, and sounds to the language. Edward the Confessor built Westminster Abbey, building a whole complex around the abbey, and this became the centre of government. Thus the new pronunciation norms which were originally from Wessex in the west country, originated from London English. The ruling classes had many documents re-copied into London dialect, and any older spelling norms were discarded for London based pronunciations. Which is why the amount of English documents produced declined, and the main language spoken for law and government, and anyone literate in the language would spell out what they heard.
The Church was the main practitioner of writing until the Norman conquest. After the conquest writing was used for governmental purposes, and was used in the Court Chancery in London. Thus becoming the seat of official record keeping of the time. By the 1300s spelling started advancing greatly in a written assortment called Chancery English.
Oxford and Cambridge, the great seats of learning, also started developing written English with their revolving clerical workforce.
The Arrival of the Printing Press
By the 1400s the printing press brought speed and growth for manuscripts to be spread, changing the written word forever. Bureaucracy and record keeping continued to grow. and take off. The government started creating property records, taxes, financial records, and documentation for crime and punishment being carried out.
Schools and centres for learning trained not only religious workers, but also clerical workers in literacy. London became the centre of linguistic standard, and with the help of the printing press, and because documents moved around more than people, influenced the spelling norms of the time.
Printers outside of the control of the church and government began to set their own standards for writing and spelling which made the printing process a lot easier. This was the start of publishing houses that we have today.
The Great English Vowel Shift propagated through communities and ripped away the conservative written forms of long vowels from their fluctuating pronunciations. Which left the English language with a set of letter-to-written vowel correspondence different from anywhere else in Europe.
By the late 1500s printing had normalised the Middle English system. Putting in place a smaller set of variants, resulting in a set of letter-to-sound mismatches greater than those in Europe and better than French which was codified later.
Reformation and Renaissance Period
England became a Protestant country in the late 1500s, and as part of its new administration documents were required such as liturgies for the newly confirmed Church of England. Along with the Book of Common Prayer, and above all copies of the Bible.
Until the Reformation, the demand for an accessible version of the Bible had been thwarted centuries earlier. With a few versions of the Bible being produced in the 1500s resulting in the King James Bible of 1611, one of the most influential and widespread books of the time, greatly influencing writers of the time.
The Birth of the Dictionary and Other Grammatical Reference Tools
Dictionaries and other grammatical reference tools started appearing as early as the Middle Ages. These were interlinear glosses, or explanations of difficult words in manuscripts. Some of these explanations can be found in manuscripts dating back to the 7th or 8th century, recording the earliest form of English.
The first bilingual glossary to find its way into print was French-English, and was used by travelers, printed in England by William Caxton with no title page in 1480. With words and expressions appearing in parallel columns on 26 leaves. John Stanbridge published a Latin-English vocabulary in 1496, published by Richard Pynson. But a much more considerable English-Latin vocabulary called the Promptorius puerorum (“Storehouse [of words] for Children”) was published in 1499 by Pynson. Generally ascribed to Geoffrey the Grammarian (Galfridus Grammaticus), who was a Dominican friar of Norfolk, and thought to have composed it in 1440.
Dictionary writing was fast becoming a recognised activity by the 18th century and learned people of the day were being commissioned by publishers to write them.
By the time Samuel Johnson wrote his Dictionary of the English Language the standardisation of spelling was closer to today's Modern English.
Standardisation and Modern Trends in Today's World
With the introduction of computers and electronic communication, the use of standardisation has been disregarded. Not to mention the use of AI, which would make you wonder what the English language will end up sounding like in the years to come.
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