The History of English Podcast · Kevin Stroud

Episode 185: Spelling Says a Lot (Part 2)

·1 hr 18 min·5 clips

Shakespeare's puns on knot and night show that initial K sounds were already disappearing in ordinary speech.

1. The History of English Podcast episode 185, “Spelling Says a Lot (Part 2),” continues the early 1600s survey of English pronunciation through letters K through Z. 2. The episode is hosted by the podcast’s narrator, who uses spelling and phonetic systems to reconstruct how English sounded in the late 1500s and early 1600s. 3. The core question is how fixed spellings preserve older pronunciations, even after sounds like K, L, O, and R changed. 4. Letter K is traced from Old English, where C often marked the K sound, to Middle English, where K returned to avoid confusion with soft C. 5. Words such as king and kiss are used to show why scribes wanted K instead of spellings that could imply sing or sis. 6. John Hart’s 1560s phonetic spellings and Alexander Gill’s 1619 system both still marked a K in words like knife and knee. 7. Shakespeare’s puns on knot and night are cited as evidence that initial K was already absent from ordinary London speech. 8. The speaker concludes that initial K was largely gone from everyday speech by the second or third decade of the 1600s, though some educated or older speakers may have kept it. 9. Letter L is then described as stable at the edges of syllables but often disappearing when it sat between a vowel and a consonant. 10. Words in the A-L-K, A-L-M, and A-L-F patterns, including talk, walk, calm, bomb, half, and calf, are used to show that L was dropping out in many words. 11. Alexander Gill’s 1619 spelling guide is used twice, once to show that some educated speech kept the L and again to show that common speech often dropped it. 12. Shakespeare’s Holofernes in Love’s Labor’s Lost is mentioned as a literary witness to newer forms in half and calf. 13. The episode also notes that scholars reinserted L into borrowings such as salmon, fault, vault, and assault because earlier Latin forms had an L. 14. That restored spelling sometimes pushed English speakers toward pronouncing a slight L in some of those words. 15. The short O section compares British rounding in hot and stop with American unrounding, where the vowel moves closer to the A sound in spa. 16. Queen Elizabeth’s spelling of stop as “stap” and Gill’s “mopsies” saying scholars as “skalerz” are used as period evidence for unrounded short O. 17. The tone is explanatory and historical, with the narrator moving letter by letter and repeatedly tying modern spellings to earlier pronunciations. 18. The format is a solo linguistic history lecture that uses examples, scholars, and Shakespeare to support each sound change. 19. Listeners interested in English spelling history and vowel shifts. 20. Listeners wanting a light, nontechnical chat about pop culture.

As heard by us

A clear K-through-Zed tour of how English spelling holds traces of changing pronunciation.

Episode 185 treats English spelling as a record of older speech, following pronunciation in the early 1600s as English was beginning to travel more widely.

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Why you'd press play

Press play when you want spelling to open a window onto how English sounded in the early 1600s.

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