When “Evening” Means “Afternoon”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, thank you, Martha.

This is Dan. I’m calling from Bella Kinwood, Pennsylvania.

Hi, Dan. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

A question about spelling.

When I was back in school, we would have a spelling test, and for each word on the test, there would be one answer that would be graded correctly.

And, of course, I’ve observed words spelled differently in Britain, and words in the U.S. might change their spelling, like donut got a simplified spelling to fit on signs.

But when you look at older works, you see different spellings, and not just that it’s different, like when you’re reading Shakespeare and you might have words spelled differently.

But sometimes in the same document, you would see multiple spellings, like Pennsylvania is spelled two different ways in the U.S. Constitution.

So I was wondering whether at an earlier time, perhaps before the printing press, whether the concept of a correct spelling didn’t exist, that as long as people could sound out the words, that was considered acceptable.

All right. So that’s a really big question. So your question in a nutshell is kind of, I mean, if I can rephrase it a little bit, is like before the printing press, what was the standard for spelling or was there one?

And the answer was, no, there wasn’t one. Not really. But there were some times when spelling in English became a little more standardized.

And there are just these kind of touch points where things happened in history where spelling got a little clearer kind of through accidents of history.

For example, if we go to the very earliest period of English, when English kind of first became something we could call English, the runic alphabet was replaced by the Roman one.

And so the people who were literate, the scribes, had to do a sound-for-sound match of the Roman letters to the runic one.

And so they standardized a little bit in that regard.

But they had to introduce three runes into the Roman alphabet to represent some sounds that were in Old English that weren’t in the Roman language, in Latin.

And those were the thorn, the eth, and the yoke.

It’s spelled Y-O-G-H.

So that’s one kind of real basic standardization that happened.

Another one might be when we’re talking about the Norman conquest of 1066.

If you remember, this introduced a huge number of changes in English.

I don’t know what your field is, but there’s a ton of French influence in English.

And this all came about because of the Norman French influence on English.

Even our spelling and the way we spell often reflects French spelling norms rather than Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, or Roman ones.

So that itself is a kind of standardization to these French rules or these French norms.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah.

And there’s usually a little twist to it because I lived in France for a few years, and words that have a circumflex end up getting an extra S, like foray becomes forest.

That’s right.

And you wouldn’t necessarily see the connection until you see them spelt out.

That’s right.

And you made a really good point because forest became standardized with that spelling in an old French in English.

Later, French became standardized with a newer spelling, but we kept the older spelling of the old French word.

So English, if we can say standardized, let me put that in like suspicious quote marks earlier than French did.

So French is a little more regular in some regard.

So at the time of the Norman Conquest, they didn’t have the A and the E circumflex?

No, it was after that, I believe, in my understanding.

So another time of standardization was when London became the seat of power in England.

And so all of this governmental power and this religious power kind of moved in that direction.

So the accent and dialect spoken in that part of the country became the preferred one.

And therefore, if you were a scribe, you are writing down the way that people in power speak there.

And that becomes the preferred spelling.

And those become the preferred words for the language.

And so all these other dialects then become unimportant or not prestigious and become considered regional.

And the same thing happened with the universities.

Oxford and Cambridge became important centers of learning in the 1300s.

And education, as we know, is a great standardizer.

And so they educated the leaders and the teachers of the future, and they set the linguistic and spelling examples that others would follow.

So all of these things are kind of, again, before the printing press really came about, are these kind of brief moments of standardization.

None of them perfect, and none of them complete, and none of them permanent.

But each one of them making their small impression upon the language to kind of bring this chaos and madness of English spelling a little, making it a little more regular.

Although, as you know, there was never any one English, and there was never any one spelling of English.

At no point in the history of English has it been written just one way.

And there were also all these attempts here and there to simplify spelling or just impose a standardized spelling, and usually they didn’t work.

And I would say that the two last things, Dan, worth remembering, and you probably are already ahead of me here in your thinking on this, the two things that had the most impact on standardization, and again, those are in suspicious quotes, are the King James Bible of 1611 and the rise of dictionaries.

And so these are after the printing press.

Just the constant presence of these in so many homes and schools meant that they were the resources that people were reading and turning to when they wanted to decide how to spell a word.

If you want two books, I can recommend two to you if you’re interested.

There’s one that’s, I would call this a popular book on spelling.

It’s by David Wolman, W-O-L-M-A-N.

It’s called Writing the Mother Tongue from Old English to Email, The Tangled Story of English Spelling.

And writing is spelled R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G, Writing the Mother Tongue.

And this other one is more academic, but I still recommend it if you’re up for just a little, something a little more chewy.

The History of English Spelling, and it’s by Christopher Upward and George Davidson.

They both complement each other very well in terms of their scope and their readability.

So, Dan, in other words, you’ve raised a vast, vast question that we could talk about for hours and hours and hours.

But try those two books, all right?

And we’ll link to them on the website.

Thank you so much for your call on letting me just barely dip my toe into a giant subject.

Oh, thanks so much.

I really enjoyed this.

Call us again sometime, all right?

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye, Dan.

You know, I’m thinking another reader-friendly book that includes a lot of this is Erica Okren’s book, Highly Irregular about the history of English. It’s very, very accessible and addresses a lot of these spelling issues.

Yeah, Erica writes great articles. If you can find her, it’s A-R-I-K-A-O-K-R-E-N-T.

And we’ll link to that on the website as well. 877-929-9673.