Spelling standards and European history and whatnot

[nebula wind phone]

I've been thinking about the way English was spelled in the early modern era — 16th-18th centuries, maybe? It seems like there was a lot of orthographic variation, lots and lots of inconsistency in how you spell a given word. And it wasn't just a matter of illiteracy, or isolation between groups of writers. By the 18th century, literacy rates were rising sharply, there was a real explosion in the number of books in print, big increases in the use of writing for day-to-day communication — and yet I get the sense it still took a long-ass time for any consensus to emerge on how to spell things.

For that matter, I get the sense that this is true in other languages. In 17th-century Spanish, for instance, it seems like there's an awful lot of inconsistency in spelling — even within a tight-knit community of highly literate folks. The Dominicans, for instance, all read and wrote — and did a lot of writing to each other — and yet the few times I've tried to read old Dominican texts (yay grad school!) I've gotten the impression of enormous variation in the spelling of ordinary words.

Anyway, here's what's bugging me: I can't think of any modern languages where the same thing is true. Sure, plenty of minority languages still don't have a standard orthography. But in the ones I'm aware of that fit that description, there's also very little public use of writing — few books in print beyond maybe a Bible, few speakers writing letters or email in the language, and so on. And on the other hand, languages of mass communication all seem to have a standard — or at worst, a few competing national standards, rather than just a hodgepodge of idiosyncracies. (I'm including English in that category. You might not like our orthography, but English-speakers within a country at least tend to agree on which obnoxious spelling conventions to use.)

What's going on here? Are there modern languages with a lot of public writing (books; letters; email; websites; whatever) and no standard orthography? Or was there something special about the mid-to-late second millennium in Europe that explains why it happened then but isn't happening now?

[linguoboy]

What's going on here? Are there modern languages with a lot of public writing (books; letters; email; websites; whatever) and no standard orthography? Or was there something special about the mid-to-late second millennium in Europe that explains why it happened then but isn't happening now?

Universal public education?

The Dominicans may have written a lot to one another, but there wasn't one of them who declared their usage the One True Spelling and had the power to enforce it. Contrast this to my own experience, where I got points deducted from my essays for using "British" spellings. It only made me more contrary, but that's a minority response; the majority are just fine with being told what they should write--particularly when failing to comply will directly affect their earning power.

And why wouldn't they be, given that the privilege accorded to those who have mastered the standard is to hold in contempt all those who haven't. A Times usage columnist once characterised bad spelling as "no better and no worse than having egg stains on one's tie". From the unending scorn I see heaped on bad spellers, I can only conclude that most educated people today are not of the same opinion.

[baraka]

Are there modern languages with a lot of public writing (books; letters; email; websites; whatever) and no standard orthography?

Scots.

[zompist]

Dictionaries, perhaps? It's hard to teach or learn proper spelling without a dictionary at hand. Johnson's dictionary didn't appear till 1755 (and even then was very expensive); that of the Real Academia for Spanish till 1741.

[Soap]

Really? I thought the conventional explanation for the sudden standardizaton of spelling was the printing press. Or was that just specific to English? According to Bryson (who we all know is a crock, but he can't be wrong all the time), early dictionaries often disagreed with each other about spelling and even in one case "spelled words two ways on the title page", perhaps to make it fit better on a line (these were the days of fixed-wdith block lettering).

Actually, it might not be Bryson, even though I pulled it from this page:
http://f2.org/humour/quotes/lang/bill-bryson.html

[Declan]

Was there really that much variation? I have read some of Swift's work with original spelling and punctuation, and it always seemed to me that the main difference was that he capitalized all nouns instead of just proper nouns.

[minimal pair]

I’d not put the standardization of European languages’ orthographies before the 19th century. Standardizing the orthography was simply a part of all the social innovations that happened in the 19th century Europe: formation of nation states with national economies and national languages, public education and high literacy rates, the first mass media etc. That’s when most of the European orthographies became standardized, too.

Before that, in the 16th-18th centuries, there was simply no such need or no conditions in the European societies for a standard orthography, like there’s been the need for it from the 19th century onwards.

The invention of the printing press, or the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of the bourgeoisie, and other post-medieval European innovations, were certainly the things required in advance for this to happen later on, but not the exact direct causes of this, I think. The 19th-century European Nationalism came as a consequence of all that, but only during the formation of the European nation states, or only when they already formed, the orthographies were standardized as a direct result of the 19th-century Nationalism movements, and of the social circumstances those movements had created in the European society.

[Soap]

There was a lot of pseudo-Frenchification in Middle English, like using -or and -our for native words describing occupations (we still have it in sailor, but not much else). Also lots of un-etymological silent e's, which could also be seen as Frenchification.

[maıráí]

Unrelated:

http://f2.org/humour/quotes/lang/bill-bryson.html

Wow, where did my hour go? That was fascinating!

[baraka]

The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for different types of macaroni.

u____u

[Magb]

Unrelated:

http://f2.org/humour/quotes/lang/bill-bryson.html

Wow, where did my hour go? That was fascinating!

I won't deny it's entertaining, but you should take a lot of with a good helping of salt. After ten odd minutes of reading I found this particularly embarrassing passage (emphasis mine):

Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any other language, though few agree on just how many sounds that might be. [...] the American Heritage Dictionary lists forty-five sounds for purely English terms, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen.

Yes, he's talking about phonemes here.

[Åge Kruger]

Unrelated:

http://f2.org/humour/quotes/lang/bill-bryson.html

Wow, where did my hour go? That was fascinating!

I won't deny it's entertaining, but you should take a lot of with a good helping of salt. After ten odd minutes of reading I found this particularly embarrassing passage (emphasis mine):

Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any other language, though few agree on just how many sounds that might be. [...] the American Heritage Dictionary lists forty-five sounds for purely English terms, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen.

Yes, he's talking about phonemes here.

Personally, I liked the bit about English being the only language that has thesauruses. What's best is that he's citing someone else who apparantly thinks this too.

[Travis B.]

Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any other language, though few agree on just how many sounds that might be. [...] the American Heritage Dictionary lists forty-five sounds for purely English terms, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen.

Yes, he's talking about phonemes here.

I would say English is pretty typical of a Germanic language in its phoneme inventory, aside from preserving interdentals and having significantly more sibilant phonemes than most Germanic languages, with only some High German languages such as Yiddish, Alemannic, and Austro-Bavarian seemingly having similarly large sibilant inventories.

[Magb]

Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any other language, though few agree on just how many sounds that might be. [...] the American Heritage Dictionary lists forty-five sounds for purely English terms, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen.

Yes, he's talking about phonemes here.

I would say English is pretty typical of a Germanic language in its phoneme inventory, aside from preserving interdentals and having significantly more sibilant phonemes than most Germanic languages, with only some High German languages such as Yiddish, Alemannic, and Austro-Bavarian seemingly having similarly large sibilant inventories.

Sure, and Germanic languages are known for having large vowel inventories but fairly average consonant inventories. There are languages with twice as many phonemes as English. That English should have "more sounds than almost any other language" is a ridiculous assertion that could only be made by someone who's done no actual research into the matter.

Anyway, most of the stuff he says about spelling seems to be more on the money. There's really no need to make up bizarre facts about English, since it has so many real quirks in the first place.

[catberry]

Has Bill Bryson ever heard of the Northwestern Caucasian languages?

[Soap]

There's also the Khoisan languages with their matrixes of clicks, and a few languages in India where they basically grand-unify every phonology of every language that's ever been spoken there since the days of Panini.

[David McCann]

Really? I thought the conventional explanation for the sudden standardizaton of spelling was the printing press.

In England it made things worse! Early printers didn't have a variety of spaces, so they couldn't justify the lines by adjusting the spacing as a scribe could. In Latin, they could shorten words by using the various well-known abbreviations, but in English they just varied the spelling. This was commented on by Salusbury in 1567; he criticises spellings like "worshippe", but notes that they may be needed by "printer in consideration for iustifying of the lynes".

There was a big change in attitude in the 18th century. Just as standardised pronunciation was adopted by the upper classes instead of the old dialects, so they standarised their spelling. Hence Lord Chesterfield writing (1750) "I know of a man of quality who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled wholesome without the w." A hundred years earlier, no-one would have cared.

[nebula wind phone]

So in a discussion I ran across elsewhere, some folks were claiming that Japanese orthography has an unusual amount of variation for such a widely-written modern language. Apparently there's a lot of disagreement as to what parts of a word should be written in kanji and what parts should be spelled out phonetically. I don't know any Japanese at all, and definitely can't read it, so I can't vouch for the claim, but I thought it was interesting.

[Zhen Lin]

That's a matter of style and taste, yes. The most amusing thing about the system is that you can use arbitrary spellings if you have the capability of typesetting furigana. Some authors employ this to convey subtle nuances which would otherwise be conveyed by context or background, e.g. spell "hometown" as "Tokyo".

[Bedelato]

There was a lot of pseudo-Frenchification in Middle English, like using -or and -our for native words describing occupations (we still have it in sailor, but not much else). Also lots of un-etymological silent e's, which could also be seen as Frenchification.

There is a lot of Frenchiness in English spelling, all as a direct result of the Conquest. <qu> (OE <cw>), <j> (OE <cg>), <ou> for historical /u:/ (>/au/ by GVS), "soft" <g, c>, all of those come from French spelling.

Silent e was also another spacing trick used by early printers.

The silent "e" was at one time pronounced. It was lost around Chaucer's time, maybe slightly after.

The use of "silent e" to mark the "long" vowels probably evolved like this:
1. Through numerous sound changes in early Middle English, final unstressed short vowels got reduced to /ə/ in most cases, and this was spelled <-e>.
2. Another sound change: Vowels were lengthened in open syllables. Single consonants belonged to the next syllable, meaning final vowels would cause lengthening; consonant clusters were split down the middle, blocking the change. This is also probably where the doubling rule comes from.
3. Final /ə/ was lost. The spelling <-e> is reanalyzed as marking the length of the preceding vowel.
4. The Great Vowel Shift. The long vowels get their present values. (Not entirely consistent; thus we have "great", with the <ea> suggesting ME /ɛ:/, evolving into /e:/>/ej/ rather than usual /i:/, which was actually a later "part two" to the shift.)

As the Essentialist Explanation goes, "Modern English read phonetically is essentially Middle English as no Middle Englishman would have spoken it."

[ná'oolkiłí]

...and a few languages in India where they basically grand-unify every phonology of every language that's ever been spoken there since the days of Panini.

I think I've heard this a few times—do you know which ones specifically? My interest is piqued.

[Legion]

Nitpick: there was already a strong will to standardize French spelling in the 16th century, and there was already a de facto standard spelling used by great authors like Montaigne or Rabelais. By the end of the 17th century, French already had several dictionaries. So yeah.

[Yng]

Has Bill Bryson ever heard of the Northwestern Caucasian languages?

What do you think?

[con quesa]

That's a matter of style and taste, yes. The most amusing thing about the system is that you can use arbitrary spellings if you have the capability of typesetting furigana. Some authors employ this to convey subtle nuances which would otherwise be conveyed by context or background, e.g. spell "hometown" as "Tokyo".

I ran across that in a Japanese novel I read for a class. In A Personal Matter (Kojinteki na Taiken), Ooe Kenzaburou writes the name of the main character as tori, "bird", using the standard kanji for that word, but every time he writes it, he writes it with the furigana for approximating English "bird" in katakana, indicating evidently that the name of the character, even in Japanese, was English "bird". The point of this was to make a comment about the interplay of western and Japanese ideas, and in class we analyzed it as having similar significance to, for instance, plot points about the character getting drunk off of either (western) whiskey or (Japanese) sake at different times.