The “Ormulum”, a 19,000 line biblical text written by a monk called Orm from northern Lincolnshire in the late 12th Century, is an important resource in this regard. Concerned at the way people were starting to mispronounce English, Orm spelled his words exactly as they were pronounced. For instance, he used double consonants to indicate a short preceding vowel (much as modern English does in words like diner and dinner, later and latter, etc); he used three separate symbols to differentiate the different sounds of the Old English letter yogh; and he used the more modern “wh” for the old-style “hw” and “sh” for “sc”. This unusual phonetic spelling system has given philologists an invaluable snap-shot of the way Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the 12th Century.
The “Ormulum”, a 19,000 line biblical text written by a monk called Orm from northern Lincolnshire in the late 12th Century, is an important resource in this regard. Concerned at the way people were starting to mispronounce English, Orm spelled his words exactly as they were pronounced. For instance, he used double consonants to indicate a short preceding vowel (much as modern English does in words like diner and dinner, later and latter, etc); he used three separate symbols to differentiate the different sounds of the Old English letter yogh; and he used the more modern “wh” for the old-style “hw” and “sh” for “sc”. This unusual phonetic spelling system has given philologists an invaluable snap-shot of the way Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the 12th Century.
Many of Orm’s spellings were perhaps atypical for the time, but many changes to the English writing system were nevertheless under way during this period:
Many of Orm’s spellings were perhaps atypical for the time, but many changes to the English writing system were nevertheless under way during this period:
the Old English letters ð (“edh” or “eth”) and þ (“thorn”), which did not exist in the Norman alphabet, were gradually phased out and replaced with “th”, and the letter 3 (“yogh”) was generally replaced with “g” (or often with “gh”, as in ghost or night);
the simple word the (written þe using the thorn character) generally replaced the bewildering range of Old English definite articles, and most nouns had lost their inflected case endings by the middle of the Middle English period;
the Norman “qu” largely substituted for the Anglo-Saxon “cw” (so that cwene became queen, cwic became quick, etc);
the “sh” sound, which was previously rendered in a number of different ways in Old English, including “sc”, was regularized as “sh” or “sch” (e.g. scip became ship);
the initial letters “hw” generally became “wh” (as in when, where, etc);
a “c” was often, but not always, replaced by “k” (e.g. cyning/cyng became king) or “ck” (e.g. boc became bock and, later, book) or “ch” (e.g. cild became child, cese became cheese, etc);
