Episode 153: Zombie Letters

Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 153, Zombie Letters.

In this episode, we're going to look at why so many English words have crazy spellings that don't seem to make any sense.

Why do words like debt and doubt have a B in there?

Why does the word sign have a G in it?

And why do names like Thomas and Esther have an H in them?

Well, of course the answer lies in the history of the language, and specifically an attempt by writers and printers in the 1500s to revive older spellings from the distant past.

In many cases, letters were added to words to reflect sounds that had disappeared over time.

In a sense, those letters were brought back to life to indicate where the word came from and to show the connection between related words in English.

Those zombie letters that were brought back to life were important to scholars, but they were a nightmare for people who wanted the language to be spelled phonetically.

So, this time, we're going to examine why those old spellings were revived and how that process contributed to the wonderful mess that is English spelling.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com slash historyofenglish.

I also wanted to let you know that the transcripts of the podcast episodes have been moved from Patreon to the main website, historyofenglishpodcast.com.

So now each episode page on the main website has the accompanying transcript.

There are a handful of transcripts missing because I haven't completed them yet, but about 90% of them are there.

Also, one other quick note.

At the end of the last episode, I mentioned that I was going to talk about the so-called inkhorn debate in this episode, but I've decided to hold that discussion until next time.

Around the current point in our overall story of English, Several important authors started to write about the nature of the language.

They debated whether English had borrowed too many words from Latin and Greek, and they debated whether English spelling should be strictly phonetic or if other factors should be taken into account.

Over the next couple of episodes, I'm going to deal with both of those debates, but I want to begin with the spelling issue.

As we know, the relationship between pronunciation and spelling is often strained in modern English.

While English spelling is generally phonetic, there are lots of exceptions, and many of those exceptions are found among very common words.

It's something that tends to frustrate a lot of people, and in fact, when people talk about how crazy English is, they're usually referring to some aspect of spelling.

English spelling is so inconsistent that it was actually turned into a contest, the spelling bee.

The spelling bee developed in the United States in the 1700s and 1800s, and it remained a largely English phenomenon until relatively recently.

And even though a few other countries now have spelling bees in other languages, it's still primarily an English contest, because most other languages spell their words in ways that are much more consistent and predictable.

Now, a lot of people today complain about those English spellings, but those complaints are not new.

In fact, in the mid-1500s, scholars in England started to complain about it as well.

And they had good reason to complain.

That's because English words had started to acquire a lot of new spellings that weren't phonetic at all.

In the mid-1500s, spellings were still in flux.

The first proper English dictionary was still over a half century away, so people spelled words the best way they could.

Most words were usually spelled like they sounded.

and some common words had spelling conventions going back to Middle English.

And sometimes, writers and printers printers would play around with spellings to indicate and convey some additional information, like the etymology or linguistic origin of the word.

That information was important at the time because English had already borrowed a lot of words from French, and in the 1500s it was borrowing a lot of words directly from Latin and Greek.

And many writers and printers were interested in where those words came from and how they were related to each other.

And since they knew how those words had been spelled in Latin, they would sometimes add in a letter to represent a sound that had disappeared over time.

It helped readers to make the connection between the English version of the word and the traditional Latin version.

And that fad for reviving old Latin letters was at its peak in the mid-1500s.

So let's begin this episode by putting those developments into some historical context, and let's look at what was happening in England at the time.

We concluded the last episode with the death of Henry VIII in 1547.

As we know from prior episodes, Henry had tried desperately to produce a male heir, which he finally did with his third wife, Jane Seymour.

And now that young boy succeeded his father as king.

His name was Edward, and at the very young age of nine he became King Edward VI.

Given his age, he wasn't old enough to rule in his own right, so a council was established to govern the country until he was older.

His mother's brother was a nobleman named Edward Seymour, and he was named as the Lord Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King's person, so he effectively served as the guardian or regent for the young king.

Seymour gave himself the title Duke of Somerset, and historians generally refer to him as Somerset.

And in his position as protector, he was in charge of the government while his nephew Edward was a minor.

And, spoiler alert, Edward's only going to make it to age 15.

So for much of his reign, his uncle Somerset was in charge.

And Somerset faced a lot of challenges.

Trouble was brewing on a lot of different fronts.

As we'll see next time, there were economic problems, and the break between the Protestants and the Catholics was becoming even more heated.

And that fed into the lingering concern about the royal succession.

Edward was only nine years old, so it would be several years before he would be old enough to marry and have children who could inherit the throne from him.

In an age when plague and other diseases were rampant, there was a concern about what would happen if Edward died before he produced an heir.

In that event, Henry VIII's last will, and an act of parliament, had declared that the throne was to pass to Edward's siblings, Mary and Elizabeth.

Of course, they were Edward's half-sisters.

They all had different mothers.

Mary was the eldest sister, so she was next in line to the throne.

And if she died without any descendants, the throne would pass to the other sister, Elizabeth.

Now this posed a couple of problems.

First, England had never been ruled by a queen, but at this point there were no male heirs in the Tudor line beyond Edward.

In actuality, the gender of Mary and Elizabeth was was only a secondary concern.

The main concern was their religion.

Mary was a devout Catholic, being the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, and Mary had never really accepted her father's annulment of the marriage to her mother.

So the Protestant reformers in the royal court dreaded the thought of Mary becoming queen.

It was thought that she would reverse all of the Protestant reforms that had taken place.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth was a Protestant, but she was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, and once again, that annulment issue posed a problem.

Since the annulment of Henry's first marriage to Catherine of Aragon was never recognized by the Pope, there was a question as to whether Henry's second marriage to Anne Boleyn was lawful, especially in the eyes of Catholics.

And if it wasn't lawful, that meant that Elizabeth was technically illegitimate.

So in the same way that many Protestants would not accept Mary as queen, many Catholics would not accept Elizabeth.

Now, I should note that Mary and Elizabeth were not the only options.

Their father, Henry VIII, had a couple of sisters, and they had descendants of their own who were also tutors.

And again, those descendants were also females.

So it seemed clear that England was going to be ruled by a queen if anything happened to Edward.

Henry VIII's youngest sister was named Mary, a very common name at the time.

She had a granddaughter named Jane Grey, known to history as Lady Jane Grey, and as we'll see next time, she became very important as young Edward's health declined, and as he and his advisors looked around for a Protestant alternative to his Catholic sister Mary.

Now, Henry VIII also had a sister named Margaret, and I mentioned her in an earlier episode because she married the King of the Scots, named James IV.

They had a son together who became King James V of Scotland, but he had died about five years earlier in 1542, leaving an infant daughter to succeed him.

She was also named Mary, and she became known to history as Mary Queen of Scots.

And she's important to our story because she was also a tutor descendant, being the grand niece of Henry VIII.

Of course, in time, she will emerge as the Catholic alternative to Elizabeth, and their rivalry will become the stuff of novels and Hollywood movies.

But at the current point in our story in 1547, she was the four-year-old queen of the Scots, while Edward VI was the nine-year-old King of England.

And even though they were cousins, arrangements had actually been made for them to marry each other when they were older.

That was part of a marriage agreement that Henry VIII had worked out before he died.

He thought that the marriage would bring Scotland under English rule.

Even though Henry secured a tentative marriage agreement with the Scots, the nobles of Scotland balked at the idea, and they broke the agreement, which led to more conflict between England and Scotland.

And in the summer of 1547, just a few months after Edward was crowned as the new king, his uncle Somerset launched an invasion of Scotland.

The Scots suffered a major defeat, losing over 10,000 men in the fighting, and the English soldiers remained in parts of Scotland as an occupying force, which proved to be incredibly expensive over time.

The Scots then turned to their traditional ally, France, and they agreed to a new marriage alliance with the French king.

It was agreed that Mary, Queen of Scots, would marry the French king's son, who was also the heir to the French throne.

And with that, young Mary was sent to the royal court in France.

Now, I wanted to take you through through those political developments because it sets the scene for so much of what happens later in our story, because the Stuart monarchs who succeeded the Tudors were the descendants of Mary Queen of Scots.

When the Tudor line came to an end with the death of Elizabeth in the early 1600s, England looked to the descendants of Mary Queen of Scots for an heir.

And that led to Mary's son James becoming the king of both countries, and that set the stage for the political union of England and Scotland in what would become known as Great Britain.

Now I mentioned the Stuart monarchy in Scotland, which also eventually became the Stuart Monarchy in England.

And if you're a fan of this period of history, you may have read about the Stuarts and noticed that the family name is often spelled two different ways: either S-T-U-A-R-T

or S-T-E-W-A-R-T.

T.

That's true for that name today in general.

Well, those alternate spellings are really the result of what happened when the young Mary Queen of Scots was sent to the French court.

The Stuart family had ruled Scotland since the 1370s, when Robert the Bruce's daughter married a man named Walter, who held the title of High Steward of Scotland.

Steward had become essentially a family title, and by that point the family had converted that title of Steward into the surname Stewart, spelt just like Steward, except with a T at the end, so S-T-E-W-A-R-T.

But when Mary went to live in France, she found that the French speakers around Paris had a problem pronouncing that W sound.

They sometimes substituted a different sound for the W sound, like the G sound.

We've encountered that issue before.

That's why English has several word pairs, where one version of the word came from Norman French, where the W sound was pronounced, and the other version came from the standard French around Paris, where the G sound was often substituted at the beginning of the word.

That gave us Norman warranty and Parisian guarantee, and Norman warden and Parisian guardian.

Well, when Mary Queen of Scots arrived in Paris, she found that most people pronounced her surname Stuart without the W sound in the middle.

So Mary modified the spelling of the family name by dropping the W in the middle and inserting a U to represent the vowel sound.

That brought the spelling more in line with the French pronunciation, and from that point on, the house of Stuart spelled S-T-E-W-A-R-T, became the house of Stuart spelled S-T-U-A-R-T.

Today you might find the name Stuart spelled in the English fashion with a W or in the French fashion with a U, thanks in part to Mary Queen of Scots.

By the way, this also helps to explain why we call that letter W in English, but in French it's called doublevais, literally double V.

English had developed the letter by putting two U's together, thus W.

Well, French didn't need that letter at the time, but they did eventually adopt it in the 1800s, in part because loanwords were entering French with that sound and that letter.

But by that point, printers had settled on the modern form of the letter, which looks like two V's instead of two Us.

So for that reason, French speakers called it double V, or doublevé.

So the difference in the name of the letter in French has to do with the evolution in the design of the letter and its delayed adoption within French.

So the different spellings of the name Stuart exist in part today because of the influence of two different languages on the name.

A sound that was common within English was lost within French, and a letter to represent that sound in English was discarded in French.

That's a good example of how words can lose certain sounds and letters over time as pronunciations change, and as words pass between languages where the sounds are slightly different.

But sometimes that process can work in reverse.

A dropped letter can be revived and brought back to life, and when it's put back in the word, it can start to be pronounced again.

And just as STEWART lost its W when it passed into French, we have examples where French words actually gained a W sound when they were borrowed into English.

And one very good example of that is the word language itself.

The word language is derived from the Latin word lingua, spelled L-I-N-G-U-A.

The Romans had the W sound, and they represented it with the letter U.

And that's how the U was used in lingua.

But again, the standard French of Paris lost that sound over time, so Latin lingua evolved into Old French longage,

usually spelled L-A-N-G-A-G-E.

And that's how the word passed into English in the early Middle English period.

And that's how English speakers pronounced the word longage.

And it was still being pronounced that way in English at the current point in our overall story in the mid-1500s.

And we know that because an English scholar named John Hart composed a detailed summary of English pronunciation and spelling during this period, and he specifically indicated that the word language was pronounced longage, without a W sound in the middle.

Well, most English writers and scholars spoke Latin, and they knew that the word longage had come from the Latin word lingua.

So they knew that the original version of the word had a U in it, which marked a w sound that had been lost over time.

And many of them considered the Latin version of the word word to be the proper or correct form of the word, which had been slurred and altered over time within French and English.

So by the mid-1500s, many of those English writers and scholars were starting to add that U back into the word longage when they spelled it.

So it went from L-A-N-G-A-G-E

to L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E.

They thought that spelling was better because it helped to link the English word back to the original Latin version.

We also need to keep in mind that Latin spelling had been fixed and standardized, whereas English spelling was still in flux.

That also gave the Latin form of the word a certain legitimacy and prominence.

English words were usually spelled phonetically, which inevitably produced variation.

And without fixed spellings, there was a looseness and flexibility in the way English words were spelled.

So it sort of made sense that English writers who were fluent in Latin and revered Latin would add in an original letter when they sensed that the letter was missing in the English version of the word.

It was done in part to provide a link back to the original Latin root.

It was also done to show how related English words were connected to each other thanks to that common root.

And in some cases, it was probably done in an effort to recreate what they saw as the proper pronunciation of the word, which had been altered over time.

And those are some of the reasons why English writers started to spell the word longage with its original Latin U after the G.

Eventually, that spelling was adopted by printers, and then later by dictionary makers.

As literacy spread with the printing press, more and more people read the word longage with that U after the G.

And since the letter U could still sometimes be pronounced as a W sound within English, people started to pronounce the word that way.

And over the course of the modern English period, the word longage came to be pronounced as language.

And through that process, writers and printers brought that U back to life in the word, and the word reacquired a sound and a letter that had been lost in French.

The history of the word language shows how English scholars tried to deal with the conflict between Latin and French.

Many Latin words had evolved within French, and of course English had borrowed words from both languages.

It borrowed a lot of French words in the 1300s and 1400s, but in the 1500s, with the Renaissance underway, English was borrowing a lot of words directly from Latin.

So English often ended up with two different versions of the same Latin word, one from French and one directly from Latin.

And the French version was often a shortened form of the original Latin word.

The words had become worn down over time within French.

So English writers had to determine how to spell all of those French loanwords.

Did they treat the French word as a distinct word with its own unique pronunciation and spelling, or did they treat it as basically a mispronounced Latin word, in which case they could correct the spelling by inserting letters to represent the sounds that had been lost?

Consider words like frail and fragile.

Ultimately, they're both variations of the same Latin root word, fragelis.

The Latin word passed through French and lost its G sound in the middle, so it evolved from frageilis to fragilis to frail.

And that's how the word frail passed into English in the 1300s.

But in the 1500s, English borrowed the word fragile directly from Latin.

So English ended up with fragile with its Latin G sound in the middle and the French form frail without that G sound.

In that particular case, the two words were considered to be distinct words within English, and frail never got a new letter G within English.

It continued to be spelled like it sounded.

The same thing happened with the words secure and sure.

They're both derived from the Latin word securis.

The word passed through French and lost its C sound in the middle, and that produced the word sure.

Again, English borrowed that word from French in the 1300s.

But around the current point in our overall story in the mid-1500s, English re-borrowed that original Latin root as the word secure with its C sound intact.

But again, secure and sure were apparently considered to be distinct enough that sure was left alone.

It continued to be spelled based on its pronunciation, and it didn't get a brand new C to reflect its Latin root.

Another example of this process is found in the words poor and pauper.

Again, pauper is the Latin root word, and poor is the French version which lost the P sound in the middle.

English took the word poor from French in the 1200s, and pauper was borrowed directly from Latin in the early 1500s.

But again, by that point, the word poor had been firmly established in English as a distinct word.

So writers and printers apparently felt no need to add the missing P back into the middle of the word poor.

But now let's consider another pair of words, count

and compute.

Again, these are variations of the same Latin word, computare.

Of course, count is the version that passed through French, where it lost its mp sound in the middle.

It was borrowed into English in the thirteen hundreds, where it was often used in place of the native word reckon.

Today count is a very basic word in English, but in the late fourteen hundreds English writers went back to that Latin root and borrowed the word again as compute, and as often happened, the Latin version has a slightly more elevated sense.

Small children can can count, but compute implies some type of advanced calculation.

Well, English scholars knew that compute was just the Latin version of count,

and that count had lost the mp sound in the middle.

So in this case, many of those writers and printers decided to alter the spelling of the word count

to add that mp back in.

And in the 1500s, many English documents spell the word count as C-O-M-P-T.

So the spelling wasn't phonetic at all, but that revised spelling was never fully accepted.

Maybe the M and P together were a bit too much.

Eventually, the M and P were dropped, and CONT maintained its alternate phonetic spelling, which it still has today.

But there's an interesting side note to this effort to re-spell the word count.

Sometimes the writers of this period made a mistake.

In fact, mistakes were quite common.

Around this time in the 1400s and 1500s, England had an official who was in charge of the accounts of the king's household.

The person was called the controller.

Well, many of these scholars thought that the term controller was based on the word count.

And that made sense because the controller was a type of accountant, and the first four letters of controller are C-O-N-T,

so very similar to the word count.

In reality, the word controller is derived from the word control, not the word count.

But this mistake led many writers to re-spell the word controller just like they sometimes re-spelled the word count.

And in the same way that count was sometimes spelled C-O-M-P-T on the model of compute, the term controller was sometimes spelled

T R O L L E R.

Well again, that was just a different way of spelling controller.

But both spellings existed side by side.

And eventually people accepted the alternate spelling as a distinct word, and they started to pronounce it like it was spelled.

And that gave us the modern term comptroller.

And to day some places have the official position of comptroller, which again is just the word controller with an alternate spelling that became common in the 1400s and 1500s.

As that example indicates, sometimes these new spellings stuck, and they gave English pronunciations that were historical but not phonetic.

That's how words like debt and doubt got their modern Bs.

Debt was the French version of the Latin word debitum.

Again, the word was slurred and shortened within French, and then English borrowed the word from French in the twelve hundreds.

Throughout the Middle English period, it was spelled D E T and D E T T E.

There was no B in it because there was no B in the pronunciation.

But in the 1400s, English speakers went back to the Latin root and borrowed it again as debit.

Well, writers and printers knew that debt was just the French version of debit.

So in the mid 1500s they started to stick a B in the word debt to help make that connection, or perhaps to correct what they saw as a mispronunciation of the original Latin root word.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the letter B in the word debt was in the Book of Common Prayer, which was composed around the current point in our overall story in 1549.

I'll talk more about that book next time, but it shows how these new spellings based on etymology were common in the mid-1500s.

Around this exact same time, we have the first recorded use of the word dubious in English.

It was taken from the Latin word dubitare, meaning to hesitate or waver or indicate uncertainty.

Well, English already had a version of that word via French.

It was the word doubt, which had been borrowed a few centuries earlier.

So again, from dubitare to doubt, we hear how that B sound in the middle was lost in French.

English writers usually spelled the word D-O-U-T or some similar variation, but in the late 1400s and 1500s, it started to appear with a brand new B.

Once again, writers made that basic connection between doubt and dubious, and Latin dubitare.

Through that process, the word doubt picked up its modern B in the spelling.

Around this time, the word subtle also got its modern B.

It's first recorded around the year 1547, the year that Henry VIII died and his son Edward became king.

The B comes from the Latin word subtilis.

Again, the B sound was lost in French, and English picked up the word doubt in the early Middle English period without that B sound.

But it it eventually got its B back thanks to English scholars who wanted to draw a link back to the word's Latin root.

This same process gave the word sign its modern G, S I G N.

It comes from the Latin word signum, which English writers had tapped for the word signal.

Once again, sign is the version that passed through French where it lost its G sound in the middle.

English borrowed the word sign in the 1200s and throughout the Middle English period it was spelled both ways, sometimes as S-I-N-E based on its pronunciation, and sometimes as S-I-G-N based on its etymology, but by the 1500s the G had become a permanent fixture in the spelling.

The word indict also got a new silent letter C through this process.

The Latin word was indictore.

It's the same root that gives us the word dictate.

If you dictate something, you speak it or say it out loud.

If you indict someone, you openly accuse them of a crime.

Well, the C sound was lost in the word indict as it passed through French.

It came into English in the 1300s, usually spelled E N D I T E.

But after dictate was borrowed directly from Latin in the 1500s, English writers started to make that connection back to the Latin root by putting a C in indict.

The same thing happened with the word receipt.

It comes from the Latin word recepta.

That Latin word passed through French where it lost its P sound.

That gave us the word receipt in the 1300s, usually spelled R-E-C-E-I-T, or a similar variation.

But then English borrowed the word reception directly from Latin in the late Middle English period.

And we can see and hear the P sound in that word.

Well, by the late 1500s, writers were starting to bring that P back to life and include it in the spelling of receipt as well.

Now, as you might imagine, this process was not always orderly.

People didn't have access to etymology dictionaries, so they sometimes made mistakes when they tried to recreate an older spelling, just like we saw earlier with the word comptroller, which was formed out of controller under the mistaken assumption that controller was derived from words like count and compute.

Well again, that type of thing happened a lot.

The word island got its modern s based on an assumption that it was derived from the French word isle, I S L E,

which comes from the Latin word insula.

The S sound in insula had been lost in French and produced the word isle, which still retained a silent s in the spelling.

Well, many English writers assumed that island came from the word isle, but island was usually spelled y l a n d.

There was no s in it.

That was thought to be a mistake, so an s was added to the word island to bring it in line with words like isle and its Latin root insula.

The problem is that the word island isn't related to isle or insula at all.

It's actually a native Old English word, Eland.

So it never had an S sound.

Nevertheless, in the mid-1500s, it got its modern S under the false assumption that it had been partly borrowed from French.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded spelling of island with an S occurred in 1546, the year before Henry VIII died.

Scissors also got its modern C in the late 1400s and 1500s, thanks to a mistake.

The word is actually derived from the same Latin root that gives us the word excise, meaning to cut out.

That Latin root was excesus.

The word scissors was borrowed into English in the 1400s with various spellings, like S-I-S-O-U-R-S and S-I-S-S-A-R-S.

Again, spelling was phonetic and loose at the time, but apparently some English writers thought that the word scissors was derived from the Latin word cindere,

spelled S C I N D E R E, which meant to split.

And they probably made that connection because a tailor was sometimes called a scissor in Latin, spelled S C I S S O R.

And a scissor or tailor was someone who used scissors, and it appears that that connection led writers to bring the letter C over from the name of the occupation to the cutting tool, even though the two words were unrelated.

The word delight also received a new spelling by mistake.

Delight is another French loanword with Latin roots, but it has a distinctively English spelling.

It has a silent GH in it, D-E-L-I-G-H-T.

As we know from prior episodes, English has a lot of words with a silent GH because that letter combination usually represents an Old English

sound that disappeared from standard English over time.

So most words that have a GH in modern English are Old English words.

In fact, it's one of the general rules we can use to identify Old English words.

But there are exceptions, because mistakes were sometimes made, and that's what happened with delight.

It was borrowed from French in the 1200s and was typically spelled D E L I T.

But English writers apparently thought that it was related to the Old English word light,

L I G H T.

A lot of words with the IT sound are spelled that way in English.

Light, fight, night, might, tight, and so on.

So it was probably natural to spell the word delight the same way.

So delight picked up its modern gh even though it's a French loan word and never had the sound typically represented by GH.

Mistakes in the mid fifteen hundreds also gave the words crumb and crumble their modern B's.

Crumb is an Old English word, so it's not a loan word.

It was cruma in Old English.

There was no B sound in it.

And the process of breaking something into crumbs was cremelet.

Again, no B sound.

But at the current point in our story, in 1547, we have the first recorded use of the word crumble spelled with a B.

And a couple of decades later, we have the first recorded use of the word crumb with a B at the end.

So where did that B come from?

Again, it's not a loan word, so there's no distant root word with that sound.

But English did have the Old English word dum, which was spelled with a B on the end.

That's because the word dumb was pronounced dumb in Old English.

There was also the Old English word thumb, which never had a B sound at the end, but it apparently picked up its letter B based on its similarity to the word dumb.

Again, both dumb and thumb were routinely spelled with a B in the 1500s.

So it's possible that those spellings influenced the spelling of the word crum.

Now even though the word crumb received a new B in its spelling, the B remained silent in the pronunciation of the word.

But notice what happened with related word crumble.

In that case, the B started to be pronounced.

So this was the same phenomenon we saw earlier in a word like language, which acquired a W sound after the letter U was added to the word.

And we saw the same thing happen with the word controller, which became comptroller when the letters MP were added to the middle of the word.

Sometimes the new spellings were misinterpreted by readers.

They assumed that words should be pronounced like they were spelled.

So it was only natural that people would start to pronounce some of these new letters that were being added to words to reflect their ancient roots.

In fact, these types of pronunciation changes tend to mask just how common the new spellings were in the 1500s.

I mean, in words like debt and doubt, the B sticks out like a sore thumb, so it's easy to see that those words picked up an additional letter over time.

But in words where the new letter came to be pronounced, the spelling looks normal today, and we don't even realize that a change was made at some point in the past.

For example, there were a lot of Latin words that had the prefix ad,

which meant to or toward.

Those words often lost the D sound when they passed through French, but English writers put the Ds back in many of those words in the 1400s and 1500s, and amonest became modern admonish,

avocat became modern advocate, avis became modern advice,

aventure became modern adventure, and aorn became modern adorn.

Again, the modern pronunciation hides the fact that a silent D was added to those words in early modern English, because the D isn't silent anymore.

Of course, as we've seen, this process was a bit haphazard, and mistakes were often made.

Avantage got a new D under the assumption that it also originally had the ad prefix in Latin, and avantage became advantage.

Similarly, avantsen got a new D for the same reason, and it came to be pronounced as advance.

But neither of those words had the ad prefix in Latin.

They actually had the ab prefix with a b.

So if the scholars had gotten it correct, those words would probably be pronounced abvantage and abvance today.

But they got the prefix wrong, and that mistake gave us the modern pronunciations.

Similarly, the word amaral was derived from the Arabic word amir.

But English writers were so prone to converting the initial sound from a to ad in loan words that the word amaral also got a new D, and that gave us the word admiral.

Again, that D was a mistake.

There were also a lot of Latin words with the all sound that passed into into French, where the sound evolved from all spelled a L to AU spelled AU.

And then English borrowed a lot of those words with the French aw sound.

But in the 1400s and 1500s, English writers started to put the original Latin letter L back into those words.

So the spelling switched from AU to AL,

and then the pronunciation changed within English to reflect that spelling change.

So English borrowed the word faut from French.

Then the L was put back in and it became fault.

English borrowed the word asout, and again the Latin L was revived and it became assault.

Defaut got its L and became default.

Caldron got its L and became Cauldron.

Another interesting example is the fish known as salmon.

The name began as the Latin word salmonem, but once again it lost its L in French.

English borrowed the word as salmon,

but again the Latin L was eventually added back in, but in this case the L remained silent, which is why salmon is pronounced without the L today,

in most cases.

Even though it's it's not considered to be a standard pronunciation, some people do pronounce the word as salmon today.

And if history is a guide, and it often is, it seems very likely that salmon will become more and more common over time, because most of those silent L's from the 1500s were gradually pronounced over time.

By the way, I should note that words like verdict and perfect receive their modern Cs and their modern C or K sounds through this same process.

Both words lost their Cs in French, and they passed into English as verdict and perfit or parfit.

But in the 1500s, English writers and printers put the Cs back in, and that eventually produced the modern pronunciations of verdict and perfect.

So as you can see, this process revived a lot of old letters that have been lost over time.

That's why why I called them zombie letters in the title of the episode.

They were brought back to life, and then they wreaked havoc on English spelling and pronunciation.

But so far, I've only focused on one particular scenario, Latin words that passed through French and lost a specific sound and letter, and then were borrowed into English where the letter was revived.

This scenario happened a lot in the 1500s because it was a period in which there was a lot of borrowing directly from Latin.

So English suddenly had a lot of Latin words juxtaposed beside earlier French loan words, and writers and printers were trying to reconcile the differences between those two versions of the same root word.

Well, English scholars weren't just borrowing from Latin during this period, they were also borrowing directly from Greek.

And those Greek loan words had experienced their own sound changes over the centuries.

And that also impacted English spelling during the 1500s.

So let's turn our attention for a moment to those Greek loanwords.

As we know, the ancient Romans were heavily influenced by the Greeks, and they borrowed a lot of words from the Greeks.

Those words passed into Latin, and then later a lot of those words passed into French, and then were borrowed into English.

So when we look at what happened to these words, we're basically adding an extra step to the beginning of the process that we looked at earlier.

And the reason why that's so important is because Greek words often experienced a sound change when they were borrowed into Latin, because the sounds of Latin were a little different from those of Greek.

So again, we're just adding an extra layer of complication when we look at these early Greek loan words that passed into Latin and then eventually made their way into English.

One of the reasons why many Greek words were pronounced differently by the Romans is because Ancient Greek was a very aspirated language.

And by that I mean that ancient Greek had a lot of consonant sounds that were pronounced with a breathy quality.

The original Indo-European language also had a lot of consonants that were pronounced that way.

But Latin didn't have as many of those pronunciations, and English doesn't either.

So when the Romans borrowed words from Greek that had that breathy quality, they just pronounced them in the normal Latin manner, without the aspiration.

But when Roman scribes spelled those Greek words, they felt the need to indicate that the word had come from Greek where the sound was a little different.

And they usually did that by putting a letter h after the breathy consonant.

And the reason why they used an h is because the h sound is just a slight breathy sound.

The difference between old and hold is that slight h sound at the beginning of hold, and we represent that sound with the letter H.

So the Romans used that H to mark those aspirated or breathy Greek consonants.

And notice the parallel between what the Roman scribes did in the classical era and what the English writers and printers did in the 1500s.

In both cases, the writers and scribes lived at a time when lots of words were pouring into their respective languages from the outside.

And in that environment, it was important to keep track of where those words were coming from, and the sounds that may have been altered through that borrowing.

So, for example, the Greek R sound was very aspirated.

The sound was represented with the Greek letter rho.

Well, when the Romans borrowed words from Greek with that sound, they tended to pronounce the sound with the normal Latin R sound without the aspiration.

But they wanted to preserve preserve the Greek spelling as best they could, so they just placed an H after the R to indicate that the sound was breathier in Greek.

That's how words like rhythm and rhyme originally got their RH spellings.

But over time, people didn't really care about those Greek spellings.

As words like that passed through late Latin and French, Scribes just spelled the words like they were pronounced, so the H was dropped over time.

And when English borrowed some of these Greek words via French, the words usually came in with a simple R at the beginning.

But now, in the early modern English period, when English scholars were studying Greek for the first time, and when Greek words were pouring into English, those scholars and writers wanted to indicate which of those older loan words also had Greek origins.

Once again, the etymology became important, and those writers knew that those particular words had been spelled with an RH in earlier Latin.

And so, in the 1400s and 1500s, words like rhythm, rhyme, rhetoric, and rhinoceros all regained their H and started to be spelled with their modern RH spellings in English.

Today, when we spell the R sound with RH,

it usually indicates that the word is Greek in origin.

Now, the same thing happened with the Greek K sound.

Ancient Greek had a regular K sound, which they represented with the letter kappa, which is also the origin of our modern letter K.

But Ancient Greek also had a slightly different sound that was more aspirated or breathy, more like

In later Greek the sound shifted forward and became more of a fricative, more like

The Greeks represented this breathy K sound with the letter that the Greeks called hi,

but in English it's usually called kai.

At any rate, Latin didn't need that aspirated or breathy sound, so when the Romans borrowed words with that sound, they just pronounced that sound as a regular K sound, k.

And you might remember that the Romans usually spelled the K sound with the letter C, like we do with words like car and cat.

But they also wanted to keep track of the original Greek sound and the letter that the Greeks used in those words.

So once again, the Romans just added an H after the C.

That H indicated that the sound was more aspirated or breathy in Greek.

And that's how words like chronicle and Christ and Chaos originally got their CH spellings.

Again, those words passed through late Latin and French, and since those languages just pronounced those words with a regular K sound, the H was usually dropped.

And when English borrowed those words in the Middle English period, they came in with a simple letter C at the beginning.

But again, in the 1500s, English writers recognized that words like that came from ancient Greek, so they recreated that older Latin spelling and they put the H back in those words.

During that later period, other Greek words were coming into English with a K sound, and for the same reasons, English writers and printers chose to represent that sound in those words with a CH spelling, which was a way of marking the word as being Greek in origin.

That's why later loanwords like chorus and chrome and chlorine are spelled with a CH rather than a simple C or K.

And again, today when we spell the K sound in a word with CH, it usually indicates that the word is Greek in origin.

The same process also gave us the modern pH spelling for the F sound.

The ancient Greeks had two P sounds, one that was a regular P sound, much like in modern English, and one that was heavily aspirated.

They represented the regular P sound with the letter P or PI as it's called in English.

That Greek letter is actually the origin of our modern letter P.

But for the aspirated or breathy version of the P sound, the Greeks used a a different letter called P,

or Phi as it's pronounced in English.

Well, this aspirated P sound in ancient Greek eventually shifted to an F sound.

And at the time when the Romans were borrowing a lot of Greek words, it appears that the breathy P sound was undergoing that change within Greek.

It was probably the case that some Greek dialects used the older breathy P pronunciation, and some used the pronunciation that was somewhere between a P and an F sound.

Again, the sound was evolving within Greek itself.

Well, when the Romans borrowed words from Greek with that sound, they just pronounced it as an F sound, because apparently that was the closest sound in Latin.

But again, they wanted to represent the Greek pronunciations and the Greek letter phi when they spelled those words.

So, since this letter was traditionally an aspirated P sound, and was still probably pronounced that way in some Greek dialects, the Romans added an H after the P to indicate that breathy quality, and that produced a PH spelling for the F sound in those loan words borrowed from Greek.

Well, again, as those words passed through late Latin and French, the desire to mark those words as Greek words declined.

And for the most part, those words just came to be spelled like they were pronounced, with a simple letter F.

And that's how many of those words were spelled when they passed into Middle English as well.

But in the early modern era, those English writers and printers wanted to indicate that those words had a Greek origin.

So once again, they went back and replaced the F with the old pH from classical Latin.

So words like physic, phoenix, pheasant, phlegm, and pharmacy all got their modern spelling with a pH to indicate their Greek origin.

Some words, like philosophy, had retained their pH over the centuries, so there was no need to change the spelling in those words.

And some words, like fantasy, frenzy, and frantic, were given a new pH spelling, but the older spelling with the F eventually won out.

However, fantasy, spelled pH A N T A S Y is still used sometimes and can still be found in many modern dictionaries.

Again, when we come across a word in English where the the F sound is spelled with a PH, it usually indicates a word of Greek origin.

And we can thank or blame the writers of early modern English for that.

Now there's one last Greek sound that also received the new H spelling in Latin and has survived until the modern day, and that's the modern th

spelling.

And this is a fascinating story in itself.

So let's look at what happened with TH.

We begin with the fact that ancient Greek had a regular T sound, which they represented with their letter called Tau.

That's also the early version of our modern letter T.

And Ancient Greek also had a TH sound, which they represented with a letter called theta.

Well, the reason why that's notable is because the TH sound is actually rare within the Indo-European language family.

Greek had it, and obviously English has it.

English actually has two slightly different versions of of that sound, one voiced and one voiceless.

It's the difference between the sound in them

and thimble,

which may not be noticeable until you reverse them, and you get thim and thimble.

Icelandic also has those two distinct sounds.

The th sound can also be found in a few other dialects within Indo-European languages, but overall it's pretty rare, and Latin didn't have the sound either.

So when Greek words with that sound were borrowed into Latin, the Romans just pronounced that th sound with the nearest sound in Latin, which was the T sound.

This is also common in some modern English dialects, like those in Ireland, where the th sound is often pronounced as a simple T sound.

So within Latin, the Greek TH sound became a T sound in those borrowed words, but when those words were written down, the Roman scribes wanted to to indicate that the sound had been different in Greek and had been spelled with that Greek letter theta, as opposed to the regular T letter tau.

So once again, they put an H after the T to mark that Greek the sound.

So Latin ended up with a lot of Greek words that were spelled with a TH, but were pronounced with a simple T sound.

And again, those words then passed through late Latin and French, and those later scribes saw no need to preserve the H in those words.

So very often the H was dropped, and the words were spelled with a simple T since they were now pronounced that way.

And that's how many of those words passed into English in the Middle English period.

Words like theme, throne, ethic, authentic, panther, and diphthong passed into English as team, throne, etic, autentic, panter, and diptong, all pronounced with a t sound and spelled with a simple letter T.

But then in the 1400s and 1500s, English writers and printers decided to mark those loan words as Greek words by reviving the H that had been dropped, and they gave those words their TH spellings again.

From there, one of two things happened.

In some cases, the pronunciation stayed the same with the regular T sound that had been around since the words first passed into Latin.

So those words were now spelled with a th, but pronounced with a T sound.

And that's why the herb called thyme, T H Y M E, is pronounced thyme and not thyme.

It's ultimately a Greek word that lost its th sound in Latin because Latin didn't have that sound, and then entered English spelled with a simple T as T Y M E,

and then later had its H revived to reflect its Greek origin.

But the pronunciation never changed from there.

The same thing happened with names like Thomas, T-H-O-M-A-S,

and Teresa, T-H-E-R-E-S-A, and Esther, E-S-T-H-E-R.

Those names were used in Greek and followed the same general path as a word like time.

Their pronunciations changed within Latin and then remained that way in English.

But in most cases, the T sound in those Greek loanwords shifted back to the original TH sound after the new spellings were introduced in the 1400s and 1500s.

And that's because English already had the TH sound.

So when readers encountered those new spellings with th,

they just started to pronounce the words that way.

So in essence, English reversed the sound change that Latin had introduced.

So, words like theme, throne, ethic, authentic, panther, diphthong, theater, theology, and many, many more got their modern pronunciations thanks to the revival of that H after the T in early modern English.

By the way, we still have evidence of that history in certain names, like Elizabeth, Catherine, Dorothy, and Theodore.

All of those names were used in some form in ancient Greece, and to day they're all spelled with a TH and pronounced with a TH sound.

But when they originally entered English from Latin and French, they were pronounced with a simple T sound, and that helps to explain the nicknames that we have for those names in modern English.

Elizabeth is often shortened to Betty and Betsy, not Bethy or Bethsy,

because the name Elizabeth was originally pronounced more like Elizabeth in English.

Catherine was originally more like Catherine, similar to Caterina as it's rendered in some other European languages.

And that's why Catherine is often shortened to Kate with the T sound.

We see essentially the same process at work with the names Dorothy and Theodore.

They're both Greek names, and interestingly, Dorothy is just the reverse of Theodore.

The Greek word Doron meant gift, and and theos meant God.

So Dorotheia meant gift of God, and Theodora meant God's gift.

So both names are formed from the same two root words.

And again, both names passed through Latin, and they lost their th sounds along the way.

English initially took them as Dorothe and Theodore.

which explains how we got the nicknames dot for Dorothy and Ted for Theodore.

The nicknames used the original English T sound in those words, whereas Dorothy and Theodore have regained their original TH sounds within English thanks to the spelling change.

But of course, as we know, mistakes were sometimes made.

Again, the writers and printers of the 1500s didn't have access to etymology dictionaries, so they sometimes mixed up Latin and Greek words.

That's what happened with the Latin name Anthony.

It's often spelled with a TH today because early modern writers and printers thought it was ultimately a Greek name, but it's not.

It's a Latin name.

As such, it was pronounced Antony with a T sound and was spelled with a letter T in the middle.

There was never an H.

But when the H was mistakenly added in under the assumption that the name was Greek, it created the spelling A-N-T-H-O-N-Y.

And over time, some English speakers began pronouncing the name as Anthony to reflect that spelling.

That was especially true in North America.

Britain tended to retain the traditional pronunciation as Antony.

Again, that's also why the nickname Tony has a T sound.

It's based on the original version of the name with the T sound.

The same mistake and overcorrection also gave the Latin words author and authority their modern TH spellings, and eventually their modern TH pronunciations.

They're actually Latin words, not Greek words, and they were originally pronounced more like a

and auturiti.

Another word that got its modern th through this same kind of mistake was the name of the English river the Thames.

Of course it's spelled THAMES, even though it's pronounced with a simple T sound.

The word has Celtic roots and it's been around since Old English.

It had always been pronounced with a a simple T sound at the front, but in late Middle English it started to pick up a th spelling, presumably because it resembled some of the Greek words that were coming into English at the time, like the Greek word team, which became theme after the spelling was changed.

So the Thames got a TH as well, but the pronunciation didn't change to reflect the new spelling.

The name was probably too common and too familiar to English speakers for the pronunciation to be altered by a spelling change.

Now, by this point, you're probably getting tired of all of these examples, but I wanted you to see how extensive these new spellings were around the current point in our overall story in the mid-1500s.

And in doing so, I wanted to push back against a common perception.

A lot of people with an interest in the history of English know that some of the weird spellings we have today were caused by scholars in the past who added letters to words based on etymology.

But I think there's a perception that it only affected a small number of words.

There's a notion that these spelling anomalies were caused by a few random scholars who were infatuated with Latin and thought that English words ought to resemble Latin, so they played around with the spellings.

In reality, the phenomenon was much more widespread than that.

We find these spellings scattered among documents in the late Middle Ages, composed by many different scribes, and we find find them flourishing in the early modern era among writers and printers.

It wasn't just a handful of scholars in their ivory towers.

And we find these spelling changes in lots and lots of words.

In many cases, the spelling changes are hidden from modern view today because the pronunciations have evolved over time to incorporate the spelling changes.

In other words, this was a widespread phenomenon, and it was reaching its peak around the current point in our overall story in the mid-1500s.

But not everyone liked what they were seeing and what they were reading in those English documents.

There was a growing effort to make English spelling more phonetic, and to push back against these spellings based on etymology.

Earlier in the episode, I mentioned a man named John Hart.

He was the English scholar who wrote about English spelling and pronunciation, and his writings indicate that the word language had not yet acquired its W sound in the mid-1500s.

Well, I should tell you a little more about John Hart because his writings provide the first detailed and systematic study of English spelling and phonetics.

And he's also important because he was a spelling reformer in an era just before English spelling started to become standardized.

Hart argued that English spelling should be strictly phonetic, and he made his position very clear in the title of his first book published in 1551.

It was called The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of Our English Tongue.

Given the date of that work and how detailed it is, he was probably working on it around the time that Edward VI inherited the throne from his father in 1547, and in fact the book is dedicated to the young king.

But it turned out to be essentially the first draft of a larger work.

In the years after he completed that first book, he set about revising and expanding it, and 18 years later, in 1569, he published what is generally considered to be the definitive version of his research and recommendations.

It was called an orthography.

Orthography is a fancy word that refers to the study of spelling.

And I'm going to talk about that particular book in more detail in a future episode, because it was released a couple of decades later in our story.

But again, the earlier version was composed around the current point in our story story in the mid-1500s.

And in both of Hart's books, he took aim at these spellings based on the etymology of words.

He specifically criticized the use of a B in the word doubt and the use of the MP in the word count that I talked about earlier.

He also objected to spelling the word authority with a TH.

Remember that authority was a Latin word that picked up an H after the T under the mistaken assumption that it was a Greek word.

Hart noted that the word was pronounced as autoriti and that it should be spelled with a simple T, not TH.

Of course, we know that the TH was retained and the pronunciation of that word evolved over time based on the spelling.

Hart also criticized other spellings that were common at the time, but have since fallen out of use, like the word fruit being spelled F-R-U-C-T based on its Latin root fructus, and the word condemned being spelled with a P as C O N D E M P N E D.

That P came from its Latin root condemnore.

By arguing against these Latin and Greek-based spellings, and by arguing in favor of phonetic spellings, Hart was essentially taking a stand against the growing influence of those classical languages.

He wasn't really concerned about the roots of English words or representing those roots by reviving long-lost letters.

He just wanted a simple language that people could use, a simple spelling system that people could read and write with ease.

And in that sense, he was foreshadowing that other debate that was about to get underway concerning all of those Latin and Greek words that were pouring into English, the so-called inkhorn debate.

So next time, we'll spend a little time on that debate, and we'll also trace out the major events during the reign of Edward VI, including several developments that impacted the story of English.

So until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.