ABSTRACT
English spelling is a concoction of written forms drawn from a variety of languages through processes of inheritance and borrowing. At every period in its history, the English lexicon contains words inherited from earlier stages, as well as new words introduced from foreign languages. But this distinction should not be applied too straightforwardly, since inherited words have frequently been subjected to changes in their spelling over time. Similarly, while words drawn from foreign languages may preserve their native spellings intact, they frequently undergo changes in order to accommodate to native English spelling patterns. We can trace such patterns of change by analysing spelling variation across time using historical dictionaries. The principal resource is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which includes detailed etymologies and a list of variant forms with accompanying dates. Inevitably these forms are just a selection of the range of alternative spellings that have been attested throughout the history of English (see Durkin, this volume). For the earliest periods of English, the Old English (650–1066) and Middle English (1066–1500) periods, these lists can be supplemented by recourse to period dictionaries, which include more detailed accounts of spelling forms found in texts written during these periods. Other valuable resources for analysing variation in spelling during the Middle English period are the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin 1986), which supplies detailed linguistic profiles for over a thousand manuscripts copied between roughly 1300 and 1450 and its daughter project, The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, covering the period 1150–1325 (Laing 2008–13). As we shall see, tracing the history of a word’s spelling is not always straightforward. One reason for this is that the spelling of a borrowed word may be altered so as to make it conform to the spelling of another language. The word phoenix, for instance, was adopted in Old English with the spelling <fenix>, using the Old English convention of using <f> for /f/ rather than signalling its Greek origins by using <ph>. This process has affected English spelling throughout its history, but was most prevalent in the late Middle and Early Modern (1500–1800) periods, when the prestige of the Latin language led to the respelling of a number of French loanwords to make them resemble their Latin equivalents. To make matters more complex, words were frequently borrowed from both Latin and French, with only slight variations in spelling. The verb intend, for instance, appears to have been derived from the Latin verb intendere. But the earliest instances of the word, first recorded in the fourteenth century, are spelled <entend>, showing that the word was in fact borrowed from French entendre. Later instances are spelled <intend>: does this mean they are borrowings directly from the Latin intendere, or are they the result of the respelling of the English word by writers familiar with the Latin root? Bearing such important methodological caveats in mind, this chapter will survey the various etymological sources of English spelling at key periods in its history.
