Re: Spelling rules in old languages


"Joachim Pense" <spam-collector@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:9ruq766ehvla$.uw8gffzggw2p.dlg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> How were the spelling rules in early languages (e.g., Classical Greek,
> Latin, Arabic, various Indian Languages, Japanese Kana, Old English, ...)
> imposed? Were there central organisations, maybe Governments, that
> prescribed them, or did it develop in a more anarchical way?
>
> The answer will probably depend on the language.

Indeed - I'll answer the ones I know about.

Classical Greek: the various forms of the Greek alphabet were quite well
adapted to Greek phonemes, and the values of the letters were fairly fixed
and well recognised, with the result that people performed a more or less
phonemic analysis on their speech and then recorded it appropriately. The
result is that local dialects are often recorded with their own spelling
systems. Governments had a large role: in Athens, for instance, there is the
record of the official adoption of the Ionian alphabet, which spelled long
e: and o: phonemes differently from the previous Attic alphabet, and did not
mark the word-initial /h/ phoneme (represented by a rough breathing in later
times - Ionic dialects had lost this phoneme entirely, and used <H> as
'eta', the vowel e:). Linear B, several centuries earlier, had a
well-defined system of spelling rules; the lack of variation suggests that
the scribes were likely all trained through a single system.

Latin: again, for a long time it was written as it sounded with somewhat
fixed values for the letters; the language was then fixed for literary
purposes, and the spellings were frozen at that time. The process seems to
have been one based on consensus of the intellectual class; there is a
record of various people wanting to perform reformations at one time or
another (I think it was Augustus who wanted to add a new letter to represent
the unstressed high middle vowel that occured in labial environments; he was
unsuccessful, and this vowel was sometimes written with <I> (maximus) and
sometimes <U> (postumus)). Many other changes that developed in the spoken
language were left out (such as the loss of /h/ in many peoples' speech)
because the conservatism of the written idiom had fixed the spellings.

various Indian languages: here we have to be careful, because for most of
Indian history the languages that were written were long dead. For Sanskrit,
for instance, the ultimate authority on the language's grammar was Panini,
and accordingly everything was written in accordance with the phonology that
he had established. It is interesting that the phonology of Indo-Aryan has
been remarkably stable throughout its history, in that the phonemic
inventory of most of the languages at most periods is more or less identical
(exceptions exist, of course, but it is the similarity which is striking).
The Brahmi-derived scirpts all have more or less the same slate of letters
(although the shapes differ widely), and any of these scripts can be used
with most of the languages; significantly, Sanskrit has traditionally been
written in the local script until relatively recently when Devanagari was
chosen as its standard. Thus throughout history, people have written using
the established phonology of a standardised language like Sanskrit, thus
imposing a standardised spelling as well.

Old English: every annoying scribe wrote with his own spelling system,
unfortunately. Sometimes, the same text can have different spellings of the
same word. When standards arose, they were usually associated with the
political fortunes of a particular regime, such as Late West . Nevertheless,
there is much more standardisation before the Normans showed up; Middle
English is the real period of anarchy.

Neeraj Mathur


.

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