The Philology of the English Tongue Author:John Earle Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 143. The spelling of our language has admitted a succession of changes from the earliest times to the present day. We... more » now call our orthography fixed: but perhaps the next generation will detect some changes that have taken place in our time. Orthography is always in the rear of pronunciation, and this .distance is continually increasing. As a language grows old, it more and more tends towards being governed by precedent. We spell words as we have been taught to spell them. The more literature is addressed to the eye, the more that organ is humoured, and the ear is less and less considered. A settled orthography is a habit of spelling which rarely admits of modification, and tends towards a state of absolute immutability. When a language has become literary, its orthography has already begun to be fixed. The varieties of spelling which have taken place from the fourteenth century until now, may appear considerable to those who have only glanced at old books; but in reality they are very limited. A few slight variations, often repeated, will make a great difference in the legibility of a page, to the eye that is unaccustomed to such variations. It might be thought that the idea of orthography was a modern affair, and that the spelling of our early writers was chaotic and unstudied. But this would be a great mistake. 144. The poet of the Ormulum (a.d. 1215) earnestly begs that in future copies of his work, respect may be had to his orthography. The passage has been quoted and translated above, 60. Chaucer also, in the closing stanzas of his Troilus and Creseide, begs that no one will ' miswrite' his little book, by which he means that no one should deviate from his orthography : Go, little booke, go my little tragedie And for...« less