English in Great Britain since 1700

2. Comment on the history of English spelling reforms. What and how were they trying to accomplish. What were their results

- Spelling conventions of ModE different from EModE
- The accepted changes were the following:
            - Lower case letters for all but proper nouns, adjectives and verbs (Britain, Welsh, Anglicize)
            - The “long” <ɾ> as in “ɾpeech” disappeared
            - The <k> at the ends of words like Teutonick disappeared too
- Variety of movements which wanted to change English ortography:
            - wanted the one-to-one relationship between phoneme and letters in the alphabet
            - alphabetic principle was more or less maintained (except for Pitman shorthand and Lodwick's Universal        Alphabet)
- "New Spelling" by Simplified Spelling Society of Great Britain:
            - <k>  for /k/ sounds in all instances --> kanot, konsekraet, detrakt
            - /ð/ is spelled as <dh> as in dhis 
            - final <e> is dropped in words such as sens
- StE spelling gives preference to etymological spellings --> causes inter-linguistic intelligibility
- Scots spelling is similar to StE spelling but there are some Scottish conventions such as <ui> for fronted /(j)y/