Most people know that the spelling in the English language is not consistent. We have words where we drop the y and make it an I or double n’s. It clearly is not a simple explanation to why some words are spelled the way they are. Spelling of English arrived in the 7th century. At that time, 84% of the 17,000 words were spelled consistently. That soon changed. In 1066, as we learned in class, the Normans invaded England. With them they brought their language, Norman French. They started applying their language to the courts and administration. That began the first change in English spelling. After that words started getting printed in 1465. The printing machines were run by Dutch technicians. Those technicians got paid by the letter. To get a better wage, they would make words longer by adding letters. Their excuse at times was that they didn’t understand how English worked. A third way that English spellings got so out of control was that people wrote how they spoke in their regional dialects. So there could be multiple ways to spell shower. If you were from the country, you might spell it schaar. Latin and Greek words and spelling of words were included into the English language around the 16th and 17th centuries. They were deemed equal to English and because there were no spelling guidelines, people could copy a book however they wanted. Many books probably got re-published based on a regional dialect or the addition of letters by the Dutch technicians. There was no easy way to separate the languages back into their original forms, so English just kept its new form. It is now a mix of Norman French, Latin, Greek and Dutch. Through printing the English language was able to bring about a standard that they could compare other writings and printings to. The London dialect became the standard and we now had a way to compare and contrast our language.
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