Of the Orthography of the British Tongue

Introduction – Alexander’s Hume’s Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue

Ilaria Rizzato

Alexander Hume’s birth is placed in 1550, “presumably in Dunbar”[1]. He had a remote connection with the noble Home family in Berwick[2]. He was educated at Dunbar Grammar School, where he studied under the famous grammarian Andrew Simson, which must have raised an early interest in language and norms in him. With Simpson he learnt the Despauterius, the very popular Latin grammar for schools he would bitterly criticise in his later writings[3], and possibly the Dunbar Rudiments, written by his teacher[4].

Subsequently he became a student at St Mary’s College, St Andrews University, where his teacher was John Hamilton, regent of St Mary’s College[5]. Three students named “Alexander Hume” were enrolled in St Andrews at the time, and for this reason his biographers do not agree on his graduation year. The hypothesis that seems most likely to be correct is that he obtained his Master’s Degree in 1572[6]. The presence of John Hamilton and his family, who were extremely influential Catholics in the dominantly reformed University, exposed Hume to religious controversy, which would emerge in his later religious writings[7].

There are no records of his activity until he moved to Oxford University, where he was “incorporated 26 June, 1580”[8]. He spent sixteen years in England, the first two of which at Oxford, tutoring a noble youth[9]. He then served as a schoolmaster at Bath, as he also mentioned in his Orthographie[10]. He then returned to Scotland, to be appointed principal master of Edinburgh High School in May 1596[11], an institution with a reputation for undisciplined students and a difficult relationship with the town council[12]. Under his rule the school underwent many changes, involving the amount of teaching staff employed and the subjects taught. He seems to have had a focus on Latin language and literature, especially through the use of Simson’s Dunbar Rudiments[13]. He resigned from Edinburgh High School in 1606, taking up the position of master of the prestigious Prestonpans Grammar School[14], where he taught Latin, Greek and Hebrew[15].  Here Hume set out to write his Grammatica Nova, in the attempt of providing a more systematic Latin grammar for schools, meant to replace the Despauterius and the works by his contemporaries[16]. Hume’s grammar never obtained the desired monopoly as a schoolbook, but remains the most imposing work he wrote.

After completing his Latin grammar, Hume left Prestonpans to return to Dunbar and become the master of his former Grammar School[17]. During this period, Hume had the honour of pronouncing a welcome address to King James VI returning to Scotland for the first time after fourteen years. The King stopped at Dunglass Castle, the residence of the Earl of Home, a distant relative of the grammarian, and here Hume delivered his speech in Latin[18]. His address to the King reveals that Hume “was clearly an advocate of union under a British flag, but was keen that the Scottish element should not be steam-rollered out of existence”[19], a stance that also characterises his views on English and Scots expressed in the Orthographie.

Hume’s Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue appeared shortly after the King’s visit to Dunglass. The manuscript is undated, which makes it impossible to ascertain exactly when it was written, but its dedication to James I of England, making reference to his visit to Scotland, suggests that it was written shortly after James’s coronation to the southern kingdom, which means that the book was completed around the year 1617[20].

In his “Preface” to the first printed edition of the Orthographie, Wheatley provides a detailed description of the source manuscript:

The following Tract is now printed for the first time from the original Manuscript in the old Royal Collection in the Library of the British Museum (Bibl. Reg. 17 A. xi). It is written on paper, and consists of forty-five leaves, the sizes of the pages being 53/4 in. by 33/4in. The dedication, the titles, and the last two lines are written with a different ink from that employed in the body of the MS., and appear to be in a different handwriting.[21]

The extended title of the Orthographie is significant of its structure and main aims: Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue: A Treates, Noe Shorter than Necessarie for the Schools. This work is in fact divided into two parts, the “Orthographie” and the “Congruitie”, the former being devoted to English spelling and its relationship with sound, the latter concerned with the grammar of English. The first part is preceded by a dedication to King James. Both parts are subdivided into mostly brief chapters devoted to a specific topic, each of which contains a set of numbered items either providing a definition or an example or a comment to the topic or issue stated in the chapter title. The overall effect is that of a concise essay, presenting a schematic pattern and a punctual treatment of the problems posed. From the number of items per section and their development, the part on orthography emerges as the most elaborate in the book.

The Orthographie may be considered to continue the long-lasting debates on orthoepy characterising the British scene during the seventeenth century[22]. It  is divided into eleven chapters, although numbering only ranges from one to ten due to the fact that the seventh and eighth chapters are both erroneously labelled as “7”: “Of the groundes of orthographie”; “Of the Latine vouales”; “Of the Britan vouales”; “Of consonants”; “Of our abusing sum consonants”; “Of the syllab”; “Of the rules to symbolize”; “Of rules from the Latin”; “Of sum idioms in our orthographie”; “Of the accentes of our tongue”; “Of the apostrophus and hyphen”. The second and the eighth chapters, on Latin vowels and Latin rules respectively, suggest that Latin consistently represents the measure against which even the English language is evaluated. They also testify, together with the many Latin examples peppered throughout the text, to the continuity of this work with his Grammatica Nova, especially in its original approach to grammar, deviating from the persisting model of the Despauterius and of more recent grammars sharing its method. Also similar is the prescriptive approach to linguistic matters, in line with the educational purpose of his work and with his vast experience as a schoolmaster.

A comparison emerging as even more important, however, is that between English usage in Scotland and “in the south”, that is, in England. Hume, who was born and educated in Scotland, but had also spent sixteen years in England, considers Scottish English on the same level as the English spoken in England in terms of standard spelling and pronunciation, rather than an inferior variety. Its value also lies in the attempt to explain the relationship between spelling and pronunciation in a thorough and systematic manner. In this connection, the Orthographie represents a unique voice among contemporary grammars, and an important testimony of what the English spoken in Scotland sounded like at the time.

The Congruitie is made up of thirteen chapters looking at person, number, the determination of the person, the gender of a noun, the case of the noun, the degrees of comparison, the verb’s person and number, the mood of the verb, the “tyme of the verb” (i.e., tense), the “power of the verb” (i.e., elements of conjugation), the adverb, the conjunction, and “distinctiones”, by which “punctuation” is meant. As stated above, this second part receives much less emphasis if compared to the part on orthography, but probably serves the purpose of providing a complete overview of the English grammar.

It is nonetheless apparent that the first part contains the most salient and distinctive features of the treatise and is also the one presenting moments revealing of Hume’s imposing and somewhat litigious personality as far as linguistic matters are concerned. The most prominent of these episodes deals with the spelling of words such as quho, quhen, quhat, either with a q or a w[23]. Hume recalls having an argument on this with a scholar, named a “doctour”, met at a dinner during his stay in Bath, who deemed w the correct spelling, while Hume deemed it was q, on the grounds that the sound in such words is guttural, and thus should be represented by a letter related to a guttural sound such as q, rather than a labial one such as w. To this argument, the “doctor” replied with a witty remark that made all the dinner guests laugh: “the proposition […] I understand; the assumption is Scottish, and the conclusion false”. Hume, on the other hand, did not laugh, but was bitterly annoyed at seeing “a frivolouse jest goe for a solid ansuer”[24]. This anecdote is telling not only of Hume’s commitment to his linguistic theories, but also of his rejection of a view of phonology posing only English as a possible source for standardisation and discarding Scottish English as an option. The humour in the doctour’s answer, in fact, lies in the presupposition that Scottish is not a reliable variety for establishing spelling rules.

Hume’s Orthographie is relatively underrepresented in present-day literature on seventeenth-century orthoepy. Dobson devotes a few pages to Hume’s Orthographie, only to dismiss him as a phonetician, also quoting the abovementioned Bath incident as an example of his lack of skills[25]. He also brands his book as “more amusing than useful”, complaining about the fact it is not concerned with standard English and only showing some appreciation for the portrait of contemporary Scottish phonetics emerging from the Orthographie[26]. Similar criticism comes from Kniezsa, who also seems more interested in what Hume has to say about the English spoken in England and the time he spent there, although she gives him credit for looking at the differences between the English spoken in Scotland and in England[27]. Lass briefly mentions his notion of raised vowel in his overview of English phonology and morphology,[28] but his treatment of the Orthographie is very limited. Durkan deals more extensively with Hume’s life and works, but his focus is mainly on his Grammatica Nova and on his views on the teaching of Latin[29]. More recently, Campbell devoted a monograph to Hume’s Orthographie, whose emphasis is on the relationship between spelling and sound in English. Her reading of Hume’s biography and works highlights Hume’s expertise in the phonology of the English spoken both in Scotland and in England with no bias in favour of the latter, which distinguishes the Orthographie from any other grammar in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,[30] a view that singles out the book’s most original features and that is fully supported by the evidence in its text.

[1] Durkan, 212. Previous sources, including Wheatley, state that both his birth and death dates are unknown.

[2] Wheatley, v.

[3] Durkan, 212. The Despauterius was a Latin grammar, named after the Flemish scholar Jan de Spauter, who lived between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

[4] Campbell, 21.

[5] Durkan, 212.

[6] Campbell, 21; Dunlop, 438.

[7] Campbell, 23-24.

[8] Foster, 766.

[9] Durkan, 112.

[10] Hume, 18.

[11] McCrie, 383, 473; Wheatley, vii.

[12] Campbell, 27.

[13] Campbell, 28.

[14] McCrie, 383; Wheatley, vii.

[15] Durkan, 115.

[16] McCrie, 382; Durkan, 115-116.

[17] McCrie, 383, 475.

[18] Wheatley, viii.

[19] Durkan, 121.

[20] Wheatley, v; Campbell, 34.

[21] Wheatley, v.

[22] Nevalainen, 129, 151-157.

[23] Hume, 18.

[24] Hume, 18.

[25] Dobson, 316-321.

[26] Dobson, 321.

[27] Kniezsa, 60.

[28] Lass, 85-86.

[29] Durkan, 112-125.

[30] Campbell, 7-8.

Bibliographical notes

Primary sources

Hume: Alexander Hume, Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue (London-New York-Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1870).

Secondary sources

Campbell: Molly Campbell, The Relationship between Sound and Spelling in Alexander Hume’s Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue. (Glasgow: University of Glasgow MPhil(R) thesis, 2021).

Dobson: E.J. Dobson, English Pronunciation 1500-1700, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).

Dunlop: Annie I. Dunlop, Acta facultatis artium Universitatis Sanctiandree 1413-1588, vol. 2. (Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable Ltd for the Scottish History Society, 1964).

Durkan: John Durkan, Scottish Schools and Schoolmasters 1560-1633. Jamie Reid-Baxter (ed. & rev.). (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press for the Scottish History Society, 2013).

Foster: Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500-1714: Their Parentage, Birthplace, and Year of Birth, with a Record of their Degrees, vol. 2. (Oxford: James Parker & Co., 1891).

Kniezsa: Veronika Kniezsa, “Alexander Hume: Of the Orthography and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue”, in Scottish Language 16 (1997), pp. 52-62.

Lass, Roger, “Phonology and morphology”, in Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language 1476-1776, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 56-186.

McCrie: Thomas McCrie, Life of Andrew Melville (Edinburgh-London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1856).

Nevalainen: Terttu Nevalainen, “Variable focusing in English spelling between 1400-1600”, in Susan Baddeley and Anja Voeste (eds.), Orthographies in Early Modern Europe (Berlin-Boston: Mouton De Gruyter Company, 2006), pp. 127-165.

Wheatley: Henry B. Wheatley, “Preface”, in Alexander Hume, Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue (London-New York-Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1870).

The present version of Alexander Hume’s Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue is based on the first printed edition of the book, first published by Oxford in 1865 for the Early English Text Society and reappeared in its second edition in 1870[31]. Both editions were edited by Henry B. Wheatley, who also wrote a short Preface to the text, outlining Hume’s life and works.

[31] Wheatley, v-xi.