Orm ~ part two,too,to

Now, we are just at the end of the medieval period and cruising toward the renaissance, which England only had because Italy had already tried it and ended up having a really great time.

Up until this period, there wasn’t a whole lot of writing done by anybody.  They didn’t sell reams of paper in those days, and pencils were pretty rare.  The only books were hand copied bibles that came out of dark monastery cells and had to be illustrated so that if 999 out of every 1000 people alive happened to look inside, they could get some idea of what story was being told – because nobody knew how to read.  And what reading and writing there was happened in latin, because it was all about religion, which should be a lesson to all publishers today.

But at our point in time, the human mind was just beginning to stir and to actually think (see Monty Python), and more and more people, wishing to move up the food chain, began to learn the intellectual arts.  This is where spelling comes in.  There is very little point in your sitting down and taking time and effort to turn out a graphic representation on paper of your thought if nobody can ever read it.  If this last observation sounds personal to anybody reading here, good.

So people had to find forms of words that everybody could agree on.  Like “dog” should be spelled “d-o-g” rather than “d-e-a-g” or “d-a-g,” or “dwoag” (which is the New York dialect) or “dahwg” (which is the Texas).  In the spelling game, you are allowed to say what you see any way you like.  But you always have to write the thing in the prescribed way.  (pre-scribed)

At first, it was hard to work out the code.  There were at least six major dialects of Middle English spoken by the folks there (did you know you can drive all the way across England in one day? You could fit the thing inside Texas and still have thousands of cattle-spreads in the land that’d be left over).  Which one of these dialects were you going to take as THE definitive, real way of speaking?

And once you settled that, you had to fight over the actual sounds of written letters.  It was during this time that we lost the “thorn,” the letter that was exclusively the “th” sound.  Too bad about that.  I really liked that letter.  And the “ash” which is a sort of a-upside-down-e that is useful if you have an Irish accent.  Both of these are still used clandestinely by phonologists in dark back rooms of universities, even today.

But still, there were no dictionaries.  Well, there were no books, generally, again—outside of monasteries—and who was going to waste time and paper on something like a dictionary when Scrabble hadn’t yet even begun to be envisioned?

Along comes Orm.  Orm, a twelfth century monk.  Who wrote the Ormulum, one of the first seriously self published works in the language.  Because there were no actually spelling rules already, Orm made up his own: you double the consonant after every “short” vowel.

Thus:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog would be written:

The quickk browwn foxx jummpedd overr the lazy dogg.

(Orm obviously did not have to fight MS Word over the writing of this.)

The problems are immediately apparent: writing was taking twice as long as it needed to, and in the style of the day, with the worn tips of the feather pens monks had to use, you had so many “mimims” or vertical strokes in the writing of the letters, reading was like not seeing the meaning for the trees.

But the man had tried.  And it was an intuitive system.  You listened to the way the word sounded, and you knew how many “r”s to write.

Chaucer came along a couple of hundred years later (we are spanning the time from Early Middle English to Late Middle English), and with his borrowed renaissance light, began writing all kinds of randy little rhymes for the entertainment of the now-beginning-to-be educated middle class.  And he wrote these ditties in the East Midlands dialect, which pretty much set that dialect up for life, considering they spoke it in Oxford and London, too.

Read Chaucer and tell me he can spell.

Then jump ahead to the mid eighteenth century and Samuel Johnson.  Sam Johnson, who decided he was going to write the definitive dictionary of dictionaries.  HE was going to show us how to do it.  HE was going to stabilize the language once and for all—and he was going to do it based on the history of words, giving the concept of spelling weight and significance.

And he did just that.

He made mistakes, too.

As in: the word meaning that you’ve borrowed money and you’re going to have to pay it back, and it’s hanging over your head.  In Middle English, there was a word for this: dette.  It had been used for hundreds and hundreds of years, and may have come from a German root of the time (NOBODY KNOWS REALLY – and I can argue this kind of thing quite intelligently, right in the face of writers of modern dictionaries and acceptors of the conventional wisdom).  The word was pronounced just as it looked: dette.  But Sam Johnson decided that forever after (after his book was published, that is), educated English speakers would spell it “debt,” hearkening back to an assumed root in Latin – “debit.”

Even if the derivation were absolutely sure, English speakers had ALWAYS pronounced the thing without a “B.”   Now, third graders in AMERICA and AUSTRALIA have to put a “B” in the dang thing or risk failing their spelling tests.  Even though NO ENGLISH SPEAKER EVER SAID D-E-B-T.

And the word “colonel”?  Yeah, ever get that one wrong?  Ever try to look that one up in the dictionary?  ANY dictionary?  Read this and the light will go on.  You will finally see spelling for what it is: only a social convention that God did not invent.

Now.  When I took French, I was amazed how easily I could spell everything.  That’s because French is a nice, neat language that comes almost whole cloth out of one nice lingual tradition.  Not to say there are not irregularities.  But by and large, you can say something and feel how to spell it.

But our language – our unique (I’d say “blend” but that’s too clean and civilized a word) pastiche of grammars, traditions, irregularities and even cultural influences and connotations – it’s impossible.  Latin, Greek, German, Italian, probably Sanskrit and Lithuainian – not to mention Yiddish – bits all smashed together into one English sentence.

The puzzling thing to me is that I am such a reader—I grew up with a book plastered to my face.  I read the words over and over, a thousand times over—but my brain never memorized the forms.  The spelling of these words should have made sense.  If it had made sense, I’d have remembered and been able to replicate.

So in some ways, we might as well be writing in kanji—except with kanji you’re at least drawing concept pictures.  But what have we got?  A nonsense string of letters that may come out “Carey-Ann” or “Karey-Anne”, or “Kerrie-Ahn” or “Karii-An” or “Cahree-Ahn”  and people get their noses out of joint when you mispronounce their names.

So if I write “pallet,” instead of palette – just remember that Orm would have written the stinking thing “pallett” and never would have given the French root a second thought.

So there.

Anyway, any misspelling you find in my stuff ?  Probably a typo.

Conclusion: spelling is like the dollar – it has no real value unless the person you’re offering it to believes in it.