The Anglish Alphabet

This is a system I hope will be accepted as Anglish's official but optional spelling reform. I think this system is worthy of that role because I specially designed it to be. Rather than fill the reform up with standardisations, innovations, Pan-Germanic elements, and anachronism for the sake of anachronism, I followed the normal Anglish procedure of only targeting foreign influence for change, and I also tried to only revert foreign spelling conventions when I felt there were practical English spelling conventions to swap to.

‹gh› is almost certainly based on ‹ȝh›, which itself was a spinoff of using ‹ȝ› for /x/, which was a spelling convention linked directly to the Norman invasion and the importation of the Carolingian ‹g›. That being so, the spelling convention in Middle English (and to a lesser extent Modern English) to drop /x/ from spelling is a quick and easy way of removing this French-born digraph.

Although ‹th› had been used all the way back in Old English, ‹þ› had firmly secured its place in the English alphabet until it was knocked out when printing presses based on foreign alphabets were imported to England. ‹þ› survived for a while by being represented by ‹y› in print, but eventually printers swapped to ‹th› consistently.

I do not think ‹th› should be reverted to ‹ð› because it seems ‹ð› died off simply because it became more popular to use only ‹þ›.

I do not think ‹w› should be reverted to ‹ƿ› because the rise in popularity of ‹w› was not necessarily due to French influence. It should be noted that ‹w› was used in English orthography before French influence (although back then it was a digraph or ligature, not a full-fledged letter).

I do not think ‹wh› should be reverted to ‹hw› because even though some claim ‹hw› was swapped out for ‹wh› under influence of French ‹ch›, I think it is more likely that English ‹wr› and ‹wl› served as the basis for ‹wh›, especially after the loss of ‹hr› and ‹hl› made ‹hw› an oddity.

NONSTANDARD POSSIBILITIES

Below are some spellings that I opted to not include in the standard system as used in the wordbook.


 * French ‹qu› could also be reverted to ‹kw›, but I prefer ‹cw› because it aligns with ‹cr› and ‹cl›.


 * French ‹ch› could be reverted to ‹c› but that would cause confusion between words like cat and chat. This could be solved if ‹k› were used universally for /k/ (giving us kat and cat). There is some evidence English was heading towards such a spelling convention before the Norman Invasion (for example the spelling Dorkeceastre appears in the Winchester Manuscript in the section about the year 635, and it apparently employs ‹k› to unambiguously represent /k/), but it is impossible to know exactly how things would have turned out so I prefer to use French ‹ch› rather than innovate based on speculation.


 * French-influenced ‹sh› could be reverted to ‹sc›, but since ‹sh› came from ‹sch› which itself was almost certainly based on ‹ch›, it would be inconsistent to revert ‹sh› while not reverting ‹ch›.


 * French-influenced ‹gh› could be reverted to ‹h› but that would involve reaching back very far into English's past when Modern English and Middle English already have an inborn alternative (which is to simply stop representing the defunct /x/ phoneme in spelling).

EVIDENCE

Below are quotes that help explain where some of the thinking behind this reform comes from.


 * "The development of people offers a good paradigm for many words ending in -LE: Lat populum > OFr poeple > ME peple > people. The final syllable of people and similar words was commonly spelt in ME with a wide variety of vowel letters, as -EL, -IL, -UL, -YL, etc. In EModE, printers showed a growing tendency to prefer the Fr -LE spelling in many words of both Franco-Lat and OE descent." - Upward C, Davidson G (2011) The History of English Spelling, Wiley-Blackwell, pages 108-110.
 * "The form anneal, however, derives from OE anælan; spellings of this word with NN are first attested in the 17th century, by analogy with Latinate forms such as annex (compare similar doubling of C, F, L in accursed, afford, allay)." - The History of English Spelling, Christopher Upward & George Davidson.
 * "...[ȝh] is used for 'softened' intervocalic g, an allophone of g and h in Old English. This is a sound at the back of the throat with no equivalent in Modern English, as it has now disappeared completely. It never occurs in initial position." - Orrm's alphabetic innovation, Andrew Cooper.