The Anglish Alphabet

This article goes over how one can write with Anglish Spelling. In the same way Anglish words are meant to be native alternatives to loanwords, Anglish spellings are meant to be native alternatives to foreign influenced spellings from after 1066. Note that the point of this reform is not to introduce "cool" innovations, or to fix irregularities; all suggested spellings are based on historical spelling conventions.

=The Writ=

Below is a table with two main segments. The core reversions segment houses the reversions I think are pretty much indisputable. The extra reversion segment houses reversions I think one can make an argument for. Although ⟨ch⟩, ⟨sh⟩, and ⟨v⟩ do appear to be French influence, I have not included them among the core reversions because some Old English texts show ⟨ch⟩, ⟨sch⟩, and ⟨u⟩ (making /v/) popping up in English before 1066. This is relevant because some members of the Anglish community accept willfully borrowed foreign influence from before the Norman Invasion.

Some reversions are more random. These include: ache to ake; scythe to siþe; island to iland; accursed to acursed; allay to alay; afford to aford; affright to afrite or affriht; anneal to aneal; tongue to tung; Rhine to Rine; rhyme to rime; ghost to goast.

COMMENTARY
C
 * In Old English writers would occasionally fight ambiguity by writing /tʃ/ as ⟨ce⟩ or ⟨ci⟩ (imagine chat spelled as ceat or ciat). This can be employed to help deal with the loss of French ⟨ch⟩ if you choose to discard it.
 * Had English never borrowed ⟨ch⟩, and had English continued to use ⟨c⟩ for /tʃ/, it is likely that certain words would have retained spellings with ⟨i⟩ or ⟨e⟩. For example, church was commonly spelled with ⟨i⟩, not ⟨u⟩, in Middle English, making circ a seemingly more realistic spelling than curc.

DG
 * I have not linked ⟨dg⟩ to foreign influence so I have not touched it.

GH
 * ⟨gh⟩ is likely based on ⟨ȝh⟩, a spelling convention linked directly to the Norman invasion and the importation of the Carolingian ⟨g⟩.
 * The spelling convention in Middle English, and to a lesser extent Modern English, where /x/ is dropped from spelling (or replaced with ⟨f⟩ when applicable) is a simple and natural alternative to ⟨gh⟩. Such spellings have occasionally become standard or widespread in certain regions. Note: sluff, duff, dwarf, draft, tho, donut. However, many prefer reverting ⟨gh⟩ back to ⟨h⟩, which seems to have been the last native standard.
 * /x/ was sometimes written ⟨g⟩ and ⟨ch⟩ in Old English and Middle English, but neither ever reached the popularity of ⟨h⟩.
 * ⟨laff⟩ is preferred to ⟨lauf⟩ due to sound changes.

IE
 * Reverting ⟨ie⟩ to ⟨ee⟩ probably should not apply to the -ies in words like bloodies.

TH
 * Although ⟨th⟩ is not an "Unanglish" spelling, as it has been around since Old English, it seems to have only overcome ⟨þ⟩ because of indirect foreign influence in the form of printing presses. ⟨þ⟩ survived for a while by being represented by ⟨y⟩ in print, but eventually printers swapped to ⟨th⟩ consistently.
 * ⟨ð⟩ could be revived, but it seems to have died naturally because it lost to ⟨þ⟩.

U
 * Yule should revert to yool, not become yewl.

V
 * If you choose to replace ⟨v⟩ with ⟨f⟩, I recommend dropping pointless instances of ⟨e⟩. For example, the verb live could become lif because the ⟨e⟩ does not mark the ⟨i⟩ as long, nor does it mark the ⟨f⟩ as voiced. Additionally, some words like love and dove should probably be converted to luf and duf. This is because the switch from ⟨u⟩ to ⟨o⟩ in spelling was likely driven by a desire to visually distinguish ⟨u⟩ from ⟨v⟩.

WH
 * Some link the emergence of ⟨wh⟩ to the introduction of ⟨ch⟩, but another possibility is that the loss of ⟨hr⟩ and ⟨hl⟩ lead to ⟨hw⟩ being changed to match ⟨wr⟩ and ⟨wl⟩ instead. ⟨wh⟩ appears before 1066 at least twice (in manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), but presumably as spelling errors, or at least apathetically inconsistent spellings. ⟨wh⟩ appears after 1066 (a1121 Peterb.Chron.(LdMisc 636)), alongside ⟨hw⟩, and in instances which lack ⟨ch⟩.

Y
 * Old English's /y/ merged with /i/, resulting in ⟨y⟩ and ⟨i⟩ being interchangeable in Middle English. This seems to have set the stage for ⟨y⟩ taking the role of /j/. I doubt foreign influence had much to do with this development.

Ƿ
 * While using ⟨ƿ⟩ would certainly count as Anglish, I deem it to be less "realistic" than ⟨w⟩. My gut feeling is that writers would have switched to ⟨w⟩ by the 21st century with or without the Norman invasion. It should be noted that ⟨w⟩ (as a ligature, not a letter) and ⟨uu⟩ can be found in Old English, including Late Old English.

Ȝ
 * Although ⟨ȝ⟩ sprung off from the insular ⟨g⟩ of Old English times, this apparently only happened because the Normans brought their Carolingian ⟨g⟩ to England.

Boring Stuff
EVIDENCE - QUOTES

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


 * "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.
 * "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.
 * "After the Conquest, French scribes introduced some new spellings. . . V was ontriduced by Anglo-Norman scribes in the 13th century. . ." - Upward C, Davidson G (2011) The History of English Spelling, Wiley-Blackwell
 * "After the Conquest, French scribes introduced some new spellings. . . IE was used to represent /e:/: Old English foend, modern English fiend. . ." - Upward C, Davidson G (2011) The History of English Spelling, Wiley-Blackwell
 * "Words of Franco-Lat origin often retained the Fr single G (e.g. juge) through ME, but adopted the DG pattern (as in judge) in EModE." - Upward C, Davidson G (2011) The History of English Spelling, Wiley-Blackwell
 * "Anglo-Saxon scribes sometimes clarified the pronunciation of c using two devices. . . one device was to show the /tʃ/ value where it might otherwise not be apparent by inserting an E or I after the C; thus þencan could also be written þencean. The other device was to replace C by K to show its /k/ value before a front vowel: cyn 'kin', cyning 'king', cycen 'kitchen' were sometimes written kin (so contrasting with palatalized c in cin 'cin'), kyning, kicen. Likewise the genitive case of folk 'people' could be either folces or folkes 'of the people'." - Upward C, Davidson G (2011) The History of English Spelling, Wiley-Blackwell
 * "Phonetic spellings such as hey/hye for high, thow for though, indicative of new pronunciations developing from the 14th century onwards, were characteristic of non-Chancery writing during the first half of the 15th century." - Upward C, Davidson G (2011) The History of English Spelling, Wiley-Blackwell
 * "The wh- spelling already appears, though infrequently, in LOE as a variant of OE hw-. In ME it is used sporadically during the 12th cent., e.g., in Peterb.Chron., a gloss, and a few names; by the end of the century it is the regular spelling in Orm., from the NEM. The spelling becomes more frequent in the 13th cent., and widespread in the 14th cent." - Middle English Compendium

CREDITS

Credit goes to Henry Bane of Calques on Discord for pointing out that the loss of ⟨hr⟩ and ⟨hl⟩ could have influenced the switch from ⟨hw⟩ to ⟨wh⟩.

Credit goes to Frith for pointing out how magic-E on ⟨u⟩ used to make the native long-U sound.

Credit goes to Eadwine of the Old English Discord for pointing out that replacing ⟨ie⟩ with ⟨ea⟩ rather than ⟨ee⟩ is not supported with evidence as far as we can tell.