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result(s) for
"English language Orthography and spelling History."
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Spelling it out : how words work and how to teach them
Spelling can be a source of anxiety for school children and working professionals alike. Yet the spelling of words in English is not as random or chaotic as it is oftern perceived to be; rather, it is a system based on both meaning and a fascinating linguistic history.
Book
The French Influence on Modern English Orthography A Historical and Linguistic Analysis
Orthography is a critical component of the English language and serves as a repository for its linguistic and cultural heritage. The evolution of English orthography can be traced through three major stages: Old English, Middle English, and Modern English, each reflecting the socio-political circumstances of its time. Written records from the Old and Middle English periods reveal that the complexity of English spelling arises from the disconnection between spoken and written forms. This paper aims to explore the contributions of the French language to modern English orthography, offering a historical overview of the linguistic interplay between the two languages. It specifically investigates how the French language influenced modern English spelling through phonological, lexical, and orthographic changes. The findings demonstrate that historical events, particularly the Norman Conquest, had profound impacts on the linguistic evolution of English, shaping its orthographic system. This study underscores the significance of historical and sociopolitical contexts in understanding the development of English spelling and highlights the enduring influence of French on modern English orthography.
Journal Article
Righting the mother tongue : from Olde English to email, the tangled story of English spelling
A narrative that spells out the history of the English language and the people who have tried to make spelling make sense.
Book
Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast: the history of Scots dental fricative spellings
The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, and , among others) eventually settled on one digraph, , for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. vs and vs ) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by and /θ/ by (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes.
Journal Article
Does spelling matter?
This title narrates the history of English spelling from the Anglo-Saxons to the present-day. It also examines the changing attitudes to spelling, including numerous proposals for spelling reform, ranging from the introduction of new alphabets to more modest attempts to rid English of its silent letters, and the differing agendas they reveal.
Book
The Round Allograph of in Late Middle English
This paper discusses glyphs of the 2-shaped or “round” allograph of the grapheme with a tag protruding from the lower part of the stem, asking whether their distribution in a corpus of some 600 late Middle English texts can be meaningfully related to these texts’ localisation in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English . It discusses what localisation expresses, and uses regression modelling to show that there is no co-variation between the texts’ paleography and their orthography, although there is a measure of correlation between them. The evidence in favour is that the quantitative analysis identifies localisation in northings as a predictor of the occurrence of the tagged form of the allograph, which occurs at a higher frequency in texts localised below the Midlands line at c. 300 northings. The evidence against is the form’s scattered distribution according to the localisation variable where co-variation would imply a more clear-cut concentration of points, and also the moderate success at explaining the form’s distribution by means of variables known to explain orthographic variation.
Journal Article
And All the Arts of Peace: Phonography, Simplified Speling, and the Spelling Reform Movement, Toronto 1883 to 1886
[...]wrote Houston, the spelling of authors in the past already was variant-Milton wrote both winds and windes, for example-so spelling reform would interfere not with the \"original\" Milton but, rather, with the regularization that was a later superimposition. [...]the association may have lost its assurance of coverage in the Globe-there is some evidence that Houston's parting with the Globe was not, at least initially, a happy one, although he would retain a life-long association to the paper-but the absence of items in the World is more puzzling, given that newspaper's interest in the spelling reform cause. [...]Mr. Houston contended for greater freedom of orthography, not in the interest of diversity, but in the interest of simplicity of spelling. [...]Session of Sixth Legislature of the Province of Ontario.
Journal Article
Literature, American Style
Between 1780 and 1800, authors of imaginative literature in the
new United States wanted to assert that their works, which bore
obvious connections to anglophone literature on the far side of the
Atlantic, nevertheless constituted a properly \"American\" tradition.
No one had yet figured out, however, what it would mean to write
like an American, what literature with an American origin would
look like, nor what literary characteristics the elusive quality of
Americanness could generate. Literature, American Style
returns to this historical moment-decades before the romantic
nationalism of Cooper, the transcendentalism of Emerson and
Thoreau, or the iconoclastic poetics of Whitman-when a fantasy
about the unique characteristics of U.S. literature first took
shape, and when that notion was linked to literary style.
While late eighteenth-century U.S. literature advertised itself
as the cultural manifestation of a radically innovative nation,
Ezra Tawil argues, it was not primarily marked by invention or
disruption. In fact, its authors self-consciously imitated European
literary traditions while adapting them to a new cultural
environment. These writers gravitated to the realm of style, then,
because it provided a way of sidestepping the uncomfortable reality
of cultural indebtedness; it was their use of style that provided a
way of departing from European literary precedents. Tawil analyzes
Noah Webster's plan to reform the American tongue; J. Hector St.
John de Crèvecoeur's fashioning of an extravagantly naïve American
style from well-worn topoi; Charles Brockden Brown's adaptations of
the British gothic; and the marriage of seduction plots to American
\"plain style\" in works such as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte
Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette . Each
of these works claims to embody something \"American\" in style yet,
according to Tawil, remains legible only in the context of
stylistic, generic, and conceptual forms that animated English
cultural life through the century.
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