Re: briefly


David Tate wrote:
Nancy Lebovitz wrote:

My impression of pre-official-spelling prose is that it didn't vary *that*
much. Might there have been a modest degree of customary standardization
so that it wasn't fully phonetic?

My impression is that it *did* vary "that much", and that fully
phonetic wasn't an option then for the same reason it isn't now -- too
many competing radically diverse dialects and regional variants, all
mixed up together in the urban areas.

Are you familiar with Caxton's famous joke in the preface to the Aeneid
(1490), in which he discusses the printer's dilemmas in word choice and
spelling, and tells the story of the merchant who asked for 'eggs' in
Kent, only to get the reply "I don't speak French"?

<snipped>

You are both right. Standardized spelling came about in the late-18th
to 19th centuries: Dr. Johnson's dictionary, that Webster fellow, and
so on. But there was a dominant dialect for centuries before that.
Most English literature from the 15th century on has been written in
the midlands dialect spoken, not coincidentally, in London by the
educated classes. There was an aborted trend toward literature in a
standard Scots dialect but unification hit and that was that.

There were similar trends at about the same time in many parts of
Europe, with the dialects centered around national capitals or centers
of culture becoming the standard form of the language: Parisian
French, Castillian, and so on.

The point of the Caxton story is that the parties involved were
speaking different dialects of English and having trouble understanding
one another.

The situation from the 15th century until Dr. Johnson came along was
that most English writers were working in the standard dialect--or in
the dialect that became standard--and often used traditional spellings
within that dialect. These spellings started out as phonetic but over
the centuries became less and less so. The Great Vowel Shift is the
big example, but then there are all those extra consonents in a word
like "knight": it was a phonetic spelling for Chaucer (OK: "knyghte"
was...) but is rather less so for us. So why retain the old spellings?
Blame Chaucer and Caxton, with a smattering of Malory: high prestige
works that were widely disseminated through printing. There was a lot
of slop in the system, but by the time Dr. Johnson came along we were
primed for the idea of quasi-arbitrary spellings that are only loosely
phonetic.

Richard R. Hershberger

.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: briefly
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