ABSTRACT
The first concerted movement for the reform of English spelling gathered pace in the second half of the sixteenth century and continued into the seventeenth as part of a great debate about how to cope with the flood of technical and scholarly terms coming into the language as loans from Latin, Greek and French. It was a succession of educationalists and early phoneticians, including William Mulcaster, John Hart, William Bullokar and Alexander Gil, that helped to bring about the consensus that took the form of our traditional orthography. They are generally known as ‘orthoepists’; their work has been reviewed and interpreted by Dobson (1968). Standardization was only indirectly the work of printers. It was too well-designed to be a simple settling down of printing-house practices.
Above all it is significant that the English spelling system that emerged from the seventeenth century is not a collection of random choices from the ungoverned mass of alternatives that were available at the beginning of the century but rather a highly ordered system taking into account phonology, morphology and etymology and providing rules for spelling the new words that were flooding the English lexicon. Printed texts from the period demonstrate clearly that, during the middle half of the seventeenth century, English spelling evolved from near anarchy to almost complete predictability.
( Brengelman 1980: 334)