An Orthography

Introduction

Michela Compagnoni

John Hart (c.1501-1574) was born in Northolt, near London, into a family of landowners who had been tenant farmers for at least three generations. His father, John Hart, had been headborough of Northolt from 1461 to 1477 and served on the Great Inquest of Courts from 1481 to 1497. A man of good repute who belonged by birth to the “lesser gentry”, the father died about 1500. Although there are no records of John Hart (the son)’s baptism and education, he will probably have been educated at some public school or grammar school, for he knew Latin very well and had good groundings in Greek and Hebrew, as well as being acquainted with several contemporary vernaculars (French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Flemish and German). To judge from the knowledge he displays in his works, he must have received further education at one of the universities, Cambridge being the most likely place. Contacts with the germinal centre of mid-sixteenth-century scholarship in England are suggested by the fact that Hart had personal and intellectual links with, and seems to have been influenced by the theories and works of, the two distinguished Cambridge scholars of his time: Sir John Cheke (1514-1557), humanist, royal tutor, and administrator, and Sir Thomas Smith (1513-1577), scholar, diplomat, and political theorist. Moreover, Hart served under a third member of the group of great Cambridge humanists, Sir William Cecil (1520/1521-1598), Principal Secretary of the Queen and Master of the Court of Wards and Liveries, who appointed him Chester Herald at the College of Arms in London on 18 July 1567 as deputy of the Earl Marshal. Cecil, described by Hart as his “specially good master”, acted as his patron and allowed Hart to become first a diplomatic courier by the 1550s, and then an official of the Court of Wards and Liveries and a herald pursuivant by the 1560s, before creating him Chester Herald. After 1551, Hart might have been abroad in some sort of official capacity, probably in France, for he knew French well and studied the works of French orthographical reformers, namely Louis Meigret (c.1510-1558) and Jacques Pelletier (1517-1582).

John Hart is the author of three treatises on orthography and provides us with the first truly scientific discussion of English spelling: although he was not the first to publish his ideas on spelling, he was the first one who dealt with it so thoroughly. Otto Jespersen – the twentieth-century scholar who first made a detailed study of Hart’s works and remarked the insightfulness and modernity of the information they contain – claimed that Hart was the first phonetician of the modern period (p. 10) and “deserves a place of honour as the best representative in the sixteenth century of good, educated English Pronunciation” (p. 63). The first of Hart’s works, The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of Our Inglish Toung (1551), is an unpublished manuscript defending the case for spelling reform. Here, Hart already points to ideas that will be further developed in his second treatise, An Orthographie (1569), namely the ways in which spelling may be corrupted and the twofold purpose of spelling, i.e., 1) to make language serve as a means of communication both in print and in writing, and 2) to indicate how words are to be pronounced. In his first manuscript work, Hart also already makes clear that spelling should be simple, easy, and especially phonetic, so as to represent as accurately as possible the sounds of the spoken language by means of letters and symbols. Finally, his third treatise, A Methode or Comfortable Beginning for All Unlearned (1570), mainly instructs readers in the use of the phonetic alphabet devised as a new system of representation in Orthographie, with some changes introduced by Hart especially in terms of simplification.

Hart takes as his standard the language of the court and of London and wants to reform English orthography as a way to facilitate the acquisition of literacy by, for example, educated foreigners who needs assistance with the irregularities of English spelling or Protestants who wish to read the Bible by themselves. His system is based on the rule that every sound is represented by a single graph, which implies adding new graphs whenever specific sounds lack a single symbol in the existing alphabet. As previously mentioned, Hart’s ideas on spelling reform owe as much to English scholars (especially Smith) as to continental reformers such as Meigret and Pelletier, who had been active since the beginnings of the 1530s and who were introduced into England in the early sixteenth century. Although it did have an impact on some of his contemporaries, Hart’s reformed spelling system failed to gain general acceptance. However, among those who put it into practice was musician and courtier Thomas Whythorne (c.1528-1596), who wrote his autobiography – in fact, the earliest known continuous English autobiography – in about 1576 following some of Hart’s phonemic conventions.

The Sixteenth-Century Spelling Reform of English

In the context of the rising of English as a major literary language in England and the beginnings of the establishment of a standard form of written English also due to an increase in national feeling, the transition from fourteenth-century Middle English to sixteenth-century Modern English had entailed an unprecedented degree of orthographic confusion. The sixteenth century witnessed the first attempts to draw up rules and to devise new systems of spelling, given that the invention of printing had brought orthographic instability into the limelight and that the orthography developed in the fifteenth century by chancery scribes was still fairly standardized. The original impetus seems to have come from the interest in a reformed pronunciation of Latin and Greek showed by Erasmus, whose ideas were taken up, among others, by Smith and Cheke. Hart’s works show that he was also intimately acquainted with the heated controversy over the pronunciation of Greek between Bishop Gardiner (c.1495x8-1555), who upheld the traditional practice, and Cheke and Smith.

The more ambitious reformers were ready to discard the current spelling entirely and to re-spell the language phonetically with the help of additional symbols where necessary. However, there was no agreement as to whether English ought to be phonemic and reflect pronunciation as closely as possible, or logographic, that is, distinguishing similarly pronounced words by spelling them differently. Hart, Smith (De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogue, etc., 1568), and William Bullokar (Book at Large, 1580) were among the main sixteenth-century advocates of a more phonemic spelling system, and their theories anticipated those of other eighteenth-century reformers such as Alexander Gill (Logonomia Anglica, 1621), Charles Butler (The English Grammar or the Institution of Letters, 1633), and John Wilkins (An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, 1668).

Hart’s works are a clear example of how the English movement for orthographic reform, in which one speech-sound would be represented by one graph and vice versa, mostly aimed at improving literacy by introducing a written form of English that would be easier to understand than the extremely inconsistent spelling system developed in early printing. At the beginning of the sixteenth century orthography was fluid but at the end of the century it was far from fixed. Nevertheless, the reform led to the study of sounds themselves and, by 1600, the study of English sounds had made remarkable advances. The works of spelling reformers brought forth such achievements as the recognition of the voiced/voiceless distinction in consonants, the existence of syllabic consonants, consonant assimilation, the classification on consonants by their manner of articulation, and more systematic attempts at describing the articulations of vowels and consonants alike.  

Hart’s An Orthographie and A Methode were known to many contemporary reformers, especially to Smith and Bullokar, the latter of whom states that he had perused both Smith’s and Hart’s works and that he appreciated that fact that two men of such learning and experience were sharing a common purpose. Bullokar also suggests that the reason why Smith and Hart did not become popular in their time was that their transcriptions differed too much from traditional orthography. As a matter of fact, the general idea of a spelling reform based on the phonemic principle such as that proposed by Smith and Hart met with staunch opposition. The main opponent of this orthographical reform was Richard Mulcaster (1531/2-1611), schoolmaster and headmaster of St Paul’s School between 1596 and 1608, who denounced the idea in Elementarie (1582), his popular guidebook for teachers also intended as the first of a series of books on vernacular literacy. Mulcaster believed that the reformers, despite being men “of great place and good learning” (p. 78), had failed in their attempt because their proposals went against common practice and use. However, Mulcaster was not completely against past reformers and recognized the good intentions of those “who bearing a good affection to their natural tongue […] devised a new mean […] to bring the thing about” (p. 78).

Mulcaster’s criticism against the spelling reform can be summarised through the following points[1]: 1. letters are now universally used by English-speaking people based on a shared convention; 2. use is not a form of corruption and custom cannot be altered; 3. according to philosophers, natural things are made to serve only one hand, whereas artificial things – such as letters – may serve diverse purposes; 4. other languages use the same symbols so it is not clear why English should change them; 5. it is as bad to overcharge letters with many uses as to diversify the system by introducing new ones; 6. in devising new letters or altering the forms of existent ones, ease of writing must be taken into consideration; and, finally, 7. if readers understand what writers say, there is no need to change common use. However, especially the last of these arguments glaringly misses the point reformers were trying to make: the problem was not mutual understanding as much as ease of learning.

Although Hart’s system was severely censored by his countrymen and did not meet with the lasting success it deserved, its soundness is proved by the fact that many of his arguments are still valid today, as well as the fact that his concern for literacy and social criticism emphasise an attention towards less educated or favoured people that makes his proposal even more modern. Nonetheless, key to Hart’s failure was the issue of acceptance in light of the broad sociocultural context of his time: in Elizabethan England, language had become the symbol of recently developed national feelings, especially at a time when literature was flourishing. As Hart pointed out, many believed that English had been “of late brought to such a perfection as never the like was before”, which partly explains why the spelling reform he and others were advocating was inevitably unattainable.

John Hart’s Orthographie (1569)

Hart’s An Orthographie, printed in London in 1569 by William Seres, is the mature result of nearly twenty years devoted to the study of all the problems of English spelling, a meditation and research Hart started in his unpublished The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of Our Inglish Toung (1551). In this treatise, Hart devises a purely phonetic alphabet, which – according to Jespersen – is more than we can say of any other system of the time. As he throws a valuable light on early Elizabeth phonology, he deserves to be included among the great phoneticians and authorities on orthography of the time.

Hart’s phonetic alphabet in Orthographie comprises 26 symbols:

• 5 vowels: a, e, i, o and u, both long and short, with a subscript dot denoting length;
• 21 consonants[2]

12 voiced consonants: b, v, g, 𝒿, d, ɗ, ɀ, l, m, n, r, ժ;

9 voiceless consonants: p, f, k, ɕ, t, ƥ, s, δ, h.

He mentions 11 diphthongs:

                       7 made up of two short vowels: ua, ue, ui, ei, ie, iu, ou;

                       4 made up of a short and a long vowel: uā, uē, iū, oū.

Moreover, in his phonetic transcriptions Hart never uses capital letters on the ground that they represent the same sound as small letters. Therefore, his use of a slanting line before the word in place of capital letters makes him more consistently phonetic than some twentieth-century phoneticians, argues Jespersen.

As declared by Hart at the beginning of his treatise, the aim of Orthographie is fourfold: 1. “The first commodity for the unlearned natural English people: […] it shall cause the natural English, knowing no letter, to be able to learn to decern and easily to read (whatsoever he may see before him so written or printed) so soon as he were able to learn readily, and perfectly to know and name the number of figures or members of the body and substance of our voice and speech, and so observing the new or strange order hereafter written, the learned man may instruct any natural English reasonable creature to read English, in one quarter of the time that ever any other hath heretofore been taught to read by any former manner”. 2. “Secondly for strangers or the rude country Englishman, which may desire to read English as the best sort use to speak it: […] if any man of one or other nation would gladly learn to pronounce any strange speech which is accustomed to be written so confusedly, as it were (of necessity) only to be learned by the lively voice, and not able to be read by any order of their writing, as may be said of the Welsh and Irish; yet, using th’order hereafter, he shall be able to write either of them (or any other like) even as justly in the least voice, sound or breath, as it shall be naturally spoken unto him, and so read it again perfectly when and where soever he may see it, though many years thereafter, and though he understood no word thereof, and that by the reason hereafter showed”. 3. “Thirdly, for cost and time saved: […] we should not need to use above the two thirds or three quarters at most of the letters which we are now constrained to use, and so save the one third or at least the one quarter of the paper, ink, and time which we now spend superfluously in writing and printing”. 4. “And last, for a help for the learned sort which desire to pronounce other tongs aright: […] English Latinisms may hereby understand the Italian and high Dutch and Welsh pronunciation of their letters, which by presumption is very near as the ancient Greeks and Latins did, being according to th’order and reason of their predecessors’ first invention of them, whereby our errors are the better perceived, and in the end of the book a certain example how the Italian, high Dutch, French, and Spaniard do use to pronounce Latin and their own languages”. Hart thus makes clear that his new orthographic system was devised both as a reformed spelling of English and as a general phonetic alphabet, easy to read as well as to write cursively (and accordingly to be printed). Hart’s alphabet is in many respects very similar to modern phonetic transcriptions, although it would take more than three hundred years before Henry Sweet (1845-1912) developed his Broad and Narrow Romic symbols (Handbook of Phonetics, 1877), which are the basis for the present International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

In both The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of Our Inglish Toung and An Orthographie, Hart points out four “spelling vices”, that is, the ways in which spelling may be corrupted and abused: by diminution, when one letter is used to represent two or more sounds; by superfluity, when letters are not sounded but are employed merely to denote quantity; by usurpation, when one graph takes the place of another; and by misplacing, when the proper order of letters is violated. Before Hart proceeds to an account of the individual sounds, he describes the formation of sounds themselves, in what is regarded as the first attempt at a truly systematic description of English sounds. He begins by addressing the organs of speech, which are “the lungs or lights, arteries, throat, uvula, mouth, tongue, teeth and lips”. Here, Hart does not mention the organs responsible for voice and voicelessness, but the first English reference to the larynx is from 1578 – i.e., four years after Hart’s death – and the function of vocal cords was not acknowledged until after 1700[3]. In the following sections, Hart discusses vowels, diphthongs and triphthongs, consonants (voiced and voiceless consonants, plosives and fricatives, aspirated plosives), length and word stress, sentence-stress and intonation.

As the following table of contents makes clear, the volume is divided into eight chapters (the last two of which being practical applications of Hart’s phonetic system of transcription) and closes with a table that sums up all the contents of the treatise:

1. What letters are, and of their right use.
2. How some men maintain our abused English writing.
3. Of the diverse vices which use maintaineth in our writing, and how they are particularly by reason confuted.
4. Of the number of our vowels, and of their ancient sounds in which they are always used in the new manner hereafter, in which their perfect use, our present abused sound of some of them, are found to be diphthongs.
5. The number of our consonants and breaths, which we use in our speech, with the leaving of superfluous letters, and receiving of such other as we need, and examples of their right use.
6. Of the accidents of vowels, to weet time, tune and breath with examples of diphthongs and triphthongs, with an order of distinction and pointing used thereafter.
7. An exercise (in the new manner of writing) of that which is said, wherein is declared how the rest of the consonants are made by the instruments of the mouth, which was omitted in the premisses, for that we did not much abuse them.
8. Examples how certain other nations do sound their letters both in Latin and in their mother tongue, thereby to know the better how to pronounce their speeches, and so to read them as they do.

References

Algeo, John. 2009. The Origins and Development of the English Language (6th edition). ‎ Boston: Wadsworth Publishing.

Barber, Charles, Joan C. Beal, and Philip A. Shaw, eds. 2009. The English Language: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Danielsson, Bror. 1955. John Hart’s Works on English Orthography and Pronunciation [1551 – 1569 – 1570]. Part I: Biographical and Bibliographical Introductions, Texts and Index Verborum. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.

Danielsson, Bror. 1963. John Hart’s Works on English Orthography and Pronunciation [1551 – 1569 – 1570]. Part II: Phonology. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.

Dobson, E. J. 1957. English Pronunciation 1500 to 1700 (2 voll.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Doval Suárez, Susana. 1996. “The English Spelling Reform in the Light of the Works of Richard Mulcaster and John Hart”. Sederi 7: 127-41.

Jespersen, Otto. 1907. John Hart’s pronunciation of English (1569-1570). Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung.

Lass, Roger. 2009. “Hart, John”. In Lexicon Grammaticorum: A Bio-Bibliographical Companion to the History of Linguistics. Second Edition, edited by Harro Stammerjohann, 616-19. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Michael, Ian. 1970. English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mulcaster, Richard. 1970. The First Part of the Elementarie. Edited by R. C. Alston. Menston: The Sholar Press.

Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press.

Salmon, Vivian. 1994. “John Hart and the Beginnings of Phonetics in Sixteenth-Century England”. In Perspectives on English: Studies in Honour of Professor Emma Vorlat, edited by Keith Carlon, Kristin Davidse and Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn, 1-20. Leuven-Paris: Peeters.

Salmon, Vivian. 2004. “Hart, John”. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, published online https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/12482.

[1] Although Gill believes Mulcaster’s book was written in opposition to Smith, Mulcaster’s criticism seems to be pointed more at Hart than at Smith.

[2] See Table of Symbols in the Note to the Text below.

[3] The larynx as “the Organ, by which we receive and put forth breath, as also of making and forming” (O.E.D.) was discovered by John Banister (The Historie of Man, 1578). The importance of vocal cords was recognised by French physician Denis Dodart (1634-1707), who communicated his important discovery to the Paris Academy in 1700 and published it in Mémoires de l’Académie de Paris in 1703.

This edition of John Hart’s An Orthographie is based on the copy preserved at the Huntington Library in the Rare Books Collection (61311). In addition to this copy, Bror Danielsson – who edited the first complete critical edition of Hart’s three works, published in two volumes in 1955 and 1963 – recorded 11 other extant copies of the 1569 edition of the treatise respectively preserved at: the British Museum (G. 7481 and C. 57 a.35), the Bodleian Library (H 92), the University of Cambridge Library (Syn. 8.56.6 and Syn. 8.56.130), the Newberry Library (X 996.38), the Folger Shakespeare Library, at Plimpton Library of the Columbia University Library (422:1569:H25), the New York Public Library (KC 1569), the Illinois University Library, at the Duke of Devonshire’s Library at Chatsworth.

What follows is a table of the symbols used in this EMEGA digital edition to reproduce Hart’s newly invented graphs.

Table of Symbols