The Mother Tongue

by Bill Bryson

  Still, there is no gainsaying that people’s names in former times were rendered in a bewildering variety of ways—some of which bore scant resemblance to the owner’s preferred name. Christopher Marlowe was sometimes referred to by his contemporaries as Marley. The foremost printer of the Elizabethan age variously signed himself, in print, John Day or Daye or Daie. Charlton Laird in The Word cites a man of the period whose name is variously recorded as Waddington, Wadigton, Wuldingdoune, Windidune, Waddingdon, and many others.

  An odd fact of spelling from earlier times is that although writing must have been a laborious affair there was little inclination to compress words or simplify spellings—indeed, by all evidence, the opposite was the case. Cromwell habitually spelled it as itt, not as nott, be as bee, and at as atte, and such cumbersome spellings can be found in manuscripts right up until the modern period. It seems curious indeed that people were not driven to more compact spellings by writer’s cramp if not by urgency.

  Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. The development that changed everything was the invention of the printing press. This brought a much-needed measure of uniformity to English spelling—but at the same time guaranteed that we would inherit one of the most bewilderingly inconsistent spelling systems in the world.

  The printing press, as every schoolchild knows, was invented by Johann Gutenberg. In fact, history may have given Gutenberg more credit than he deserves. There is reason to believe that movable type was actually invented by a Dutchman named Laurens Janszoon Koster (or Coster) and that Gutenberg—about whom we know precious little—learned of the process only when one of Koster’s apprentices ran off to Mainz in Germany with some of Koster’s blocks and the two struck up a friendship. Certainly it seems odd that a man who had for the first forty years of his life been an obscure stonemason and mirror polisher should suddenly have taken some blocks of wood and a wine press and made them into an invention that would transform the world. What is certain is that the process took off with astonishing speed. Between 1455, when Gutenberg’s first Bible was published, and 1500 more than 35,000 books were published in Europe. None of this benefited Gutenberg a great deal—he had to sell his presses to one Johann Fust to pay his debts and died in straitened circumstances in 1468—but it did attract the attention of an expatriate Englishman living in northern Belgium.

  William Caxton (1422–91) was a rich and erudite English businessman based in Bruges, then one of the great trading cities of Europe. In the late fifteenth century, intrigued by the recent development of printing in Germany and sensing that there might be money in it, Caxton set up his own publishing house in his adopted city and there in 1475 he published Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy. So, a little ironically, the oldest publication in English was not printed in England, but in Flanders.

  Returning to England and setting himself up in the precincts of Westminster Abbey in London (which explains, incidentally, why printing unions to this day use such quaint terms as chapel for union branch and father for the head of the chapel), Caxton began to issue a torrent of books of all types—histories, philosophies, the works of Chaucer and Malory, and much else—and became richer still. The possibilities for quick and easy wealth led others to set up presses in competition.

  By 1640, according to Baugh and Cable, more than 20,000 titles were available in Britain—that’s not simply books, but titles. With the rise of printing, there was suddenly a huge push toward regularized spelling. London spellings became increasingly fixed, though differences in regional vocabulary remained for some time—indeed exist to this day to quite a large extent. But just as a Yorkshireman or Scottish Highlander of today must use London English when he reads, so in the sixteenth century the English of the capital became increasingly dominant in printed material of all types. Although many irregularities persisted for some time, and Caxton himself could note in his famous aforenoted anecdote that a Londoner seeking eggs in nearby Kent could scarcely make himself understood, the trend was clearly toward standardization, which was effectively achieved by about 1650.

  Unluckily for us, English spellings were becoming fixed just at the time when the language was undergoing one of those great phonetic seizures that periodically unsettle any tongue. The result is that we have today in English a body of spellings that, for the most part, faithfully reflect the pronunciations of people living 400 years ago. In Chaucer’s day, the k was still pronounced in words like knee and know. Knight would have sounded (more or less) like “kuh-nee-guh-tuh,” with every letter enunciated. The g was pronounced in gnaw and gnat, as was the l in words like folk, would, and alms. In short, the silent letters of most words today are shadows of a former pronunciation. Had Caxton come along just a generation or so later English would very probably have had fewer illogical spellings like aisle, bread, eight, and enough.

  But it didn’t end there. When in the seventeenth century the English developed a passion for the classical languages, certain well-meaning meddlers began fiddling with the spellings of many other words in an effort to make them conform to a Latin ideal. Thus b’s were inserted into debt and doubt, which had previously been spelled dette and doute, out of deference to the Latin originals, debitum and dubitare. Receipt picked up a p by the same method. Island gained its s, scissors its c, anchor its h. Tight and delight became consistent with night and right, though without any etymological basis. Rime became rhyme. In several instances our spelling became more irregular rather than less. Sometimes these changes affected the pronunciation of words, as when descrive (or descryve) became describe, perfet (or parfet) became perfect, verdit became verdict, and aventure had a d hammered into its first syllable. At first all these inserted letters were as silent as the b in debt, but eventually they became voiced.

  A final factor in the seeming randomness of English spelling is that we not only freely adopt words from other cultures, but also tend to preserve their spellings. Unlike other borrowing tongues, we are generally content to leave foreign words as they are. So when, say, we need a word to describe a long counter from which food is served, we absorb buffet, pronounced “buffay,” unconcerned that it jars with the same word meaning to hit but pronounced “buffit.” In the same way it seldom bothers us that words like brusque, garage, and chutzpah all flout the usual English pattern. Speakers of many other languages would not abide such acoustic inconsistency.

  As time went on, many English speakers grew to feel the same way. By the end of the eighteenth century people were beginning to call for a more orderly and reliable system of spelling. Benjamin Franklin spoke for many when he complained that if spelling were not reformed “our words will gradually cease to express Sounds, they will only stand for things, as the written words do in the Chinese Language” [quoted in State of the Language, page 149]. In 1768, he published A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling, but since this required the creation of six additional letters, it can hardly be called a simplification.

  People began to feel passionate about it. Noah Webster not only pushed for simplified spelling, but lobbied Congress to make it a legal requirement—turning America into the only country in history where deviant spelling would be a punishable offense.

  Another enthusiast for simplified spelling was Mark Twain, who was troubled not so much by the irregularity of our words as by the labor involved in scribbling them. He became enamored of a “phonographic alphabet” devised by Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand (which Pitman called Stenographic Soundhand, thus proving once again that inventors are generally hopeless at naming their inventions).*

  “To write the word ‘laugh,’ ” Twain noted in A Simplified Alphabet, “the pen has to make fourteen strokes. To write ‘laff,’ the pen has to make the same number of strokes—no labor is saved to the penman.” But to write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, Twain went on, the pen had to make just t
hree strokes. To the untrained eye Pitman’s phonographic alphabet looks rather like a cross between Arabic and the trail of a sidewinder snake, and of course it never caught on.

  But that isn’t to say that the movement flagged. Indeed, it gathered pace until by late in the century it seemed as if every eminent person on both sides of the Atlantic—including Darwin, Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, James A. H. Murray (the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary), and of course Twain—was pushing for spelling reform. It is hard to say which is the more remarkable, the number of influential people who became interested in spelling reform or the little effect they had on it.

  Spelling reform associations began to pop up all over. In 1876, the newly formed American Philological Association called for the “urgent” adoption of eleven new spellings—liv, tho, thru, wisht, catalog, definit, gard, giv, hav, infinit, and ar—though how they arrived at those particular eleven, and what cataclysm they feared would arise if they weren’t adopted, is unknown. In this same year, doubtless inspired by America’s centennial celebrations, the Spelling Reform Association was formed, and three years later a British version followed.

  In 1906, the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie gave $250,000, a whopping sum, to help establish the Simplified Spelling Board. One of the board’s first acts was to issue a list of 300 words commonly spelled in two ways—ax and axe, judgement and judgment, and so on—and to give endorsement to the simpler of the two. By this means, and with the support of other influential bodies such as the National Education Association, it helped to gain acceptance for the American spellings of catalog, demagog, and program and very nearly, according to H. L. Mencken [page 491], succeeded in getting tho established. President Theodore Roosevelt was so taken with these easier spellings that he ordered their adoption by the Government Printing Office in all federal documents. For a time simplified spelling seemed to be on its way.

  But then, as so often happens, the Simplified Spelling Board became altogether carried away with its success and began to press for more ambitious—some would say more ridiculous—changes. It called for such spellings as tuf, def, troble (for trouble), yu (for you), filosofy, and several dozen others just as eye-rattling. It encountered a wall of resistance. Suddenly simplified spelling went out of fashion, a process facilitated by the eruption of World War I and the death of its wealthiest benefactor, Andrew Carnegie. Its friends abandoned it, and the Simplified Spelling Board began a long slide into obscurity and eventual death.

  Yet the movement lived fitfully on, most notably in the hands of George Bernard Shaw who wrote archly: “An intelligent child who is bidden to spell debt, and very properly spells it d-e-t, is caned for not spelling it with a b because Julius Caesar spelled it with a b.” Shaw used a private shorthand in his own writing and insisted upon certain mostly small simplifications in the published texts of his own plays—turning can’t, won’t, and haven’t into cant, wont, and havnt, for example. At his death in 1950, he left the bulk of his estate to promote spelling reform. As it happened, death duties ate up almost everything, and the whole business would likely have been forgotten except that his play Pygmalion was transformed into the smash hit My Fair Lady and suddenly royalties poured in. But, as you won’t have failed to notice, this did not lead to any lasting change in the way the world spells English.

  One of the last-gasp holdouts against old-fashioned spellings was Colonel Robert R. McCormick (1880–1955), editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who for two generations insisted on such spellings as nite for night, frate for freight, iland for island, cigaret for cigarette, and some 300 others—though never all at once. After his death most of the more jarring spellings were quietly dropped. Oddly, McCormick never called for two of the most common shortenings, tho and thru. He just didn’t like them, which of course is all the reason that is necessary when it’s your newspaper.

  So while spelling reform has exercised some of our finest minds for nearly two centuries, the changes attributable to these efforts have generally been few and frequently short-lived. The one notable exception is Noah Webster (about whom more in a later chapter), though even his changes were not nearly as far-ranging as he dreamed.

  What is less often noticed is that spelling reform has been quietly going on for centuries, in a small but not insignificant way, and without the benefit of any outside agencies. In that splendidly random way that characterizes most facets of English development, it just happened. Many words have shed a pointless final e—deposite, fossile, and secretariate, for instance. Musick and physick similarly gave up their needless k’s. The tendency continues today with simplified spellings like catalog, dialog, and omelet gradually easing out the old spellings of catalogue, dialogue, and omelette, at least in America. Two hundred years ago there were scores of words that could be spelled in two or more ways, but today the list has shrunk to a handful—ax/axe, gray/grey, inquire/enquire, and (outside North America) jail/gaol—but even here there is a clear tendency in every English-speaking country to favor one form or the other, to move toward regularity.

  Even so, there is still, on the face of it, a strong case for spelling reform. Anyone who has tried to explain to an eight-year-old, or even a teenager, the difference between wring and ring or between meet, meat, and mete, or why we spell hinder with an e but hindrance without, or why proceed has a double e but procedure doesn’t, or why we spell enough, biscuit, and pneumonia in the very peculiar ways that we do will very probably appreciate that. But calls for spelling reform inevitably overlook certain intractable problems. One is that the old spellings are well established—so well established that most of us don’t notice that words like bread, thought, and once are decidedly unphonetic. Attempts to simplify and regularize English spelling almost always hav a sumwut strānj and ineskapubly arbitrary lūk abowt them, and ov cors they kawz most reederz to stumbl. There is a great deal to be said for the familiarity of our spellings, even if they are not always sensible. What simplified spelling systems gain in terms of consistency they often throw away in terms of clarity. Eight may be a peculiar way of spelling the number that follows seven, but it certainly helps to distinguish it from the past tense of eat. Similarly, the syllable seed can be spelled a variety of ways in English—seed, secede, proceed, supersede—but if in our quest for consistency we were to fix on the single spelling of, say, seed, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between reseed and recede. Fissure would become fisher; sew and sow would be so. There would be no way to distinguish between seas and seize, flees and fleas, aloud and allowed, chance and chants, air and heir, wrest and rest, flu, flue, and flew, weather, whether, and wether, and countless others. Perplexity and ambiguity would reign (or rain or rein).

  And who would decide which pronunciations would be supreme? Would we write eether or eyther? As we have already seen, pronunciations often bear even less relation to spellings than we appreciate. In spoken American English, many millions of people—perhaps the majority—say medal for metal, hambag for handbag, frunnal for frontal, tolly for totally, forn for foreign, and nookular for nuclear. Shall our spellings reflect these? The fact is, especially when looked at globally, most of our spellings cater to a wide variation of pronunciations. If we insisted on strictly phonetic renderings, girl would be gurl in most of America (though perhaps goil in New York), gel in London and Sydney, gull in Ireland, gill in South Africa, gairull in Scotland. Written communications between nations, and even parts of nations, would become practically impossible. And that, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a problem enough already.

  * Further, and possibly conclusive, evidence of this was shown in 1874 when Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, an Englishman, invented an outdoor game that he called sphairistike. It only caught on when his friend Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister, suggested he call it lawn tennis.

  9.

  Good English and Bad

  Consider the parts of speech. In Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections. In English it never has more than five
(e.g., see, sees, saw, seeing, seen) and often it gets by with just three (hit, hits, hitting). Instead of using loads of different verb forms, we use just a few forms but employ them in loads of ways. We need just five inflections to deal with the act of propelling a car—drive, drives, drove, driving, and driven—yet with these we can express quite complex and subtle variations of tense: “I drive to work every day,” “I have been driving since I was sixteen,” “I will have driven 20,000 miles by the end of this year.” This system, for all its ease of use, makes labeling difficult. According to any textbook, the present tense of the verb drive is drive. Every junior high school pupil knows that. Yet if we say, “I used to drive to work but now I don’t,” we are clearly using the present tense drive in a past tense sense. Equally if we say, “I will drive you to work tomorrow,” we are using it in a future sense. And if we say, “I would drive if I could afford to,” we are using it in a conditional sense. In fact, almost the only form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense form of drive is, yes, the present tense. When we need to indicate an action going on right now, we must use the participial form driving. We don’t say, “I drive the car now,” but rather “I’m driving the car now.” Not to put too fine a point on it, the labels are largely meaningless.

  We seldom stop to think about it, but some of the most basic concepts in English are naggingly difficult to define. What, for instance, is a sentence? Most dictionaries define it broadly as a group of words constituting a full thought and containing, at a minimum, a subject (basically a noun) and predicate (basically a verb). Yet if I inform you that I have just crashed your car and you reply, “What!” or “Where?” or “How!” you have clearly expressed a complete thought, uttered a sentence. But where are the subject and predicate? Where are the noun and verb, not to mention the prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and other components that we normally expect to find in a sentence? To get around this problem, grammarians pretend that such sentences contain words that aren’t there. “What!” they would say, really means “What are you telling me—you crashed my car?” while “Where?” is a shorthand rendering of “Where did you crash it?” and “How?” translates as “How on earth did you manage to do that, you old devil you?” or words to that effect. The process is called ellipsis and is certainly very nifty. Would that I could do the same with my bank account. Yet the inescapable fact is that it is possible to make such sentences conform to grammatical precepts only by bending the rules. When I was growing up we called that cheating.