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English spelling consistency was dealt a further blow when William Caxton brought the printing press to London in 1476. Having lived in mainland Europe for the preceding 30 years, his grasp of the English spelling system had become uncertain. The Belgian assistants whom he brought to help him set up his business had an even poorer command of it ...
Franklin modified the standard English alphabet by omitting the letters c, j, q, w, x, and y, and adding new letters to explicitly represent the open-mid back rounded [ɔ] and unrounded [ʌ] vowels, and the consonants sh [ʃ], ng [ŋ], dh [ð], and th [θ]. It was one of the earlier proposed spelling reforms to the English language.
Old English did not always make a distinction between uppercase and lowercase, and at best had embossed or decorated letters indicating sections. Middle English capitalization in manuscripts remained haphazard, and was often done for visual aesthetics more than grammar; in poetry, the first letter of each line of verse is often capitalized.
The standardization of English spelling began in the 15th and 16th centuries; the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations. [4] The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term. [5]
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English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, and kept their French spellings. The spelling of Middle English is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled in different ways, sometimes even in the same sentence. However, these were generally much better guides to the then-pronunciation than modern English ...
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Traditional Spelling Revised (TSR) is a conservative English-language spelling reform which seeks to apply the underlying rules of English orthography more consistently. [1] It was created by Stephen Linstead and chosen by the International English Spelling Congres (IESC) as the preferred alternative to the defective English orthography in ...