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

This is Episode 87, the first spelling reformers.

In this episode, we're going to look at the alphabet during the period of middle English.

We're also going to continue our look at the Ormila, a 12th century text that marked a revival of English writing.

As we saw last time, the text shows some important changes in the language, as English evolved from old English into middle English.

Those changes included lots of new words, especially Norse words, but it also included several notable changes in English spelling.

Some of those changes are documented for the first time in the Ormila, and other changes appear a short time later.

So this time, we'll look at those spelling reforms, and we'll see how many of our modern spelling conventions evolved during this period.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com

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Now this time, we're going to explore the changing alphabet during the time of middle English.

The Anglo-Saxons had adopted the Latin alphabet and made some changes to it to make it work for old English.

But after the Norman Conquest, the French educated scribes didn't like what they saw in English documents.

They looked at those documents and they saw funny looking letters, and they saw strange spellings for certain common sounds.

So those scribes decided to fix English spelling, and of course I'm putting the word fix in quotes.

What they were really doing was imposing traditional French spelling rules on English.

We see the first evidence of these changes in the final entries of the Peterborough Chronicle composed in the mid-1150s.

And we see lots more of these changes in the ormulum, probably composed in the 1180s.

These are two of the earliest middle English text, and they both show several new spellings.

But the ormulum is notable because it's the first document to clearly distinguish the pronunciation of long vowels and short vowels.

Or made this distinction by doubling the consonant after a short vowel.

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