Welcome to the History of English podcast, a podcast about the history of English language.

This is episode 184. Spelling says a lot.

This time, we're going to look at the pronunciation of English in the early 1600s,

as the language was starting to make its way around the world.

And we're going to do that by focusing on the way words are spelled.

As crazy as English spelling often seems, there's usually an explanation and logic to it

if you understand how words

were pronounced in the past. So this time, we're going to try to make sense out of English

spelling, while also recreating the sound of English in the early modern period. But before we

begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is History of Englishpodcast.com.

And you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com slash

history of English. Now before we get started, let me explain the idea behind this episode.

Throughout this podcast series, I've tried to trace the development of the

alphabet and the way it's been applied to various sounds over the centuries. I've also tried to trace

basic changes in the way English and other languages are pronounced. And of course, those two

developments are closely related to each other because theoretically, the way words words are spelled is supposed to reflect the way they are pronounced.

That isn't always the case in modern English, but spelling and pronunciation are fundamental parts of our story.

The problem is that in tracing those developments in pronunciation and spelling, the topics have been spread out over 13 years and 183 episodes.

I doubt most of you have listened to all of those episodes, and if you have, you probably don't remember all of those details.

So I thought it would be helpful to do an episode, or a couple of episodes, that provide a quick summary of all of the essential points that we've

covered as it relates to modern spelling. And I also thought it would be helpful to do that

in the context of the early 1600s, because that was the time when English was starting to spread

...