A history of the English Language

156.
The Problem of Orthography.
Spelling is for most people a pedestrian subject, but for the English, as for the French and 
the Italians, in the sixteenth century the question of orthography or “right writing,” as 
Mulcaster preferred to call it, was a matter of real importance and the subject of much 
discussion. The trouble was not merely that English spelling was bad, for it is still bad 
today, but that there was no generally accepted system that everyone could conform to. In 
short, it was neither phonetic nor fixed. Speaking generally, the spelling of the modern 
languages in the Middle Ages had attempted with fair success to represent the 
pronunciation of words, and this is true of English in spite of the fact that Norman scribes 
introduced considerable confusion when they tried to write a language that they 
imperfectly knew and carried over habits that they had formed in writing French. The 
confusion was increased when certain spellings gradually became conventional while the 
The renaissance, 1500-1650 193

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pronunciation slowly changed (see, for example, § 177). In some cases a further 
discrepancy between sound and symbol arose when letters were inserted in words where 
they were not pronounced (like the 
b
in 
debt
or 
doubt
) because the corresponding word in 
Latin was so spelled 
(debitum, dubitare),
or in other cases (for example, the 
gh
in 
delight, 
tight
) by analogy with words similarly pronounced 
(light, night)
where the 
gh
had 
formerly represented an actual sound. The variability of English spelling was an 
important part of the instability that people felt characterized the English language in the 
sixteenth century, especially as compared with a language like Latin. To many it seemed 
that English spelling was chaotic. 
In reality it was not so bad as that. There were limits to its variety and inconsistency. It 
varied more from writer to writer, according to education and temperament, than within 
the practice of the individual. Then as now, some people were more inclined than others 
to adopt a given way of doing a thing and to stick to it. Consistency in a matter like 
spelling often went with a scholarly temperament. Sir John Cheke, for example, has a 
system of spelling that he adheres to fairly closely. He doubles long vowels (
taak, haat, 
maad, mijn, thijn,
etc., for 
take, hate, made, mine, thine
), discards final -
e (giv, belev),
always uses 
i
for 
y (mighti, dai),
and so forth. It is not our system or that of most of his 
contemporaries, but it is a system, and he observed it.
3
Some writers observed a system 
for a particular reason. Thus Richard Stanyhurst, attempting a translation of Virgil (1582) 
in quantitative verse after the model of Latin poetry, employs a special spelling to help 
bring out what he believes to be the length of English syllables. He is consistent about 
spellings like 
thee
(for 
the
),
 too
(for 
to
),
 mee, neere, coonning, woorde, yeet,
but he writes 
featlye, neatlie, aptly
within three lines. He is strictly speaking consistent only so far as it 
serves his purpose to be. On the other hand, it is clear from the letters of such a man as 
John Chamberlain, which begin toward the end of the century, that the average educated 
person in Shakespeare’s day did not spell by mere whim or caprice but had formed fairly 
constant spelling habits.
4
Such habits were to some extent personal with each individual 
and differed in some particulars from one person to the next, but most writers show a fair 
degree of consistency within their own practice. It was somewhat different with the 
hastier writing of the more popular playwrights and pamphleteers. It is not always clear 
how much of their spelling is to be credited to them and how much to the printer. Most 
printers probably took advantage of the variability of English spelling to “justify” a line, 
with as little scruple about optional letters as about extra spaces. In any case a certain 
difference is to be noticed between the spelling of pamphlets like those of Robert Greene, 
which we can hardly believe were proofread, and a book like North’s