The Printing Press

Printing did not change how English was spoken, but it changed how it was written, and it made one set of spellings widely available. This chapter covers Gutenberg's press, William Caxton and the first English printing, what the sources say about printers and spelling, and why English spelling and speech parted company.

Gutenberg and the spread of printing

Wikipedia's Printing press article gives these facts:

Caxton

Wikipedia's William Caxton article gives his life as about 1422 to about 1491 (it says the birth may fall between 1415 and 1424, and the death is uncertain, possibly early 1492). He was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer, apprenticed in London to a mercer in 1438, who settled in Bruges and became governor of the Merchant Adventurers of London.

• Bruges: he set up a press with Colard Mansion after seeing the printing industry in Cologne. His translation of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye is considered the first book printed in English, in about 1473.
• Westminster, 1476: his press there is described as England's first. The first book known from it, according to the article, was Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
• What he printed: chivalric romances, classical works and histories, including Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and the first English Aesop's Fables in 1484. The article says his translations were often weak, sometimes carrying French words straight into English.
• The eggs story: in the prologue to his 1490 Eneydos, Caxton describes a mercer who asked for egges and was misunderstood until a bystander suggested eyren. He concludes that it is hard to please every man because of the diversity and change of language. I paraphrase and do not quote the line.
• Language: the article credits him with helping to standardise English around the London dialect.

Printers and spelling

Wikipedia's English orthography article gives a more specific picture:

• Standardisation: it "began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century".
• Multilingual compositors: some of the earliest mass-produced English publications were typeset by people who sometimes used the spelling patterns of other languages. The example is ghost, spelled gost in Middle English until a Flemish pattern was accidentally substituted and accepted. The William Caxton article is more cautious, saying the silent h in ghost "may have" come from Flemish habits and presenting this as an assertion.
• Basis of modern spelling: most conventions come from the phonemic spelling of Middle English, and generally do not reflect sound changes since the late 15th century, such as the Great Vowel Shift (Chapter 6).
• Etymological spellings: a few words were altered to match perceived Latin origins: a b was added to debt (originally dette) to link it to Latin debitum, and an s to island to link it to Latin insula, although the word actually comes from Old English.
• Silent letters: many, such as the l in talk and the w in sword, are remnants of earlier pronunciations.
• The gap: spelling has changed less than pronunciation, and loanwords, the lack of an official spelling authority and sound change have widened the gap.

The History section of the English orthography article was not in the text I received, so this is only the related material from its other sections.

Why spelling and speech drifted apart

Put the pieces together: a London-based written standard had spread through records (Chapter 4), printing then multiplied copies of those spellings, and the sounds kept changing. Printed spellings tended to stay where they were while speech moved on, and a few spellings were changed on purpose. That is the shape of the explanation the sources give; none of the articles I read puts it as one cause, and any single date for "fixed" spelling would be misleading.

Words to know

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