The prevalence of this letter at the end of words was largely due to the fact that the vowels a, o, and u of the original endings were all weakened to it in the break-up of the language which followed the Norman conquest. Hence, it became the common ending of the noun. The further disappearance of the consonant n from the original termination of the infinitive extended this usage to the verb. The Anglo-Saxon tellan and helpan, for instance, after being weakened to tellen and helpen, became telle and helpe. Words not of native origin fell under the influence of this general tendency and adopted an e to which they were in nowise entitled. Even Anglo-Saxon nouns which ended in a consonant—such, for instance, as hors and mús and stán—are now represented by horse and mouse and stone. The truth is, that when the memory of the earlier form of the word had passed away an e was liable to be appended, on any pretext, to the end of it. The feeling still continues to affect us all. Our eyes have become so accustomed to seeing a final e which no one thinks of pronouncing, that the word is felt by some to have a certain sort of incompleteness if it be not found there. In no other way can I account for Lord Macaulay’s spelling the comparatively modern verb edit as edite. This seems to be a distinction peculiar to himself.
How widely prevalent at one period became the use of this final e can be brought out sharply by an examination of a few pages of a single work. Take, for example, The Schoolmaster of Roger Ascham. This was published in 1570. In the admirable reprint of it, executed by Professor Arber, the preface occupies eight pages. In this limited space we find an e appended to no small number of words from which it is now dropped. It appears in the nouns bargaine, beginninge, booke, daye, deale, deede, eare, feare, fructe (fruit), gowne, greife (sic), hinte, kinde, learninge, logike, minde, realme, rhetorike, silke, sonne, spirite, sworde, stuffe, taulke, wisdome, wonte, and worke; in the verbs beare, gatte (preterite), looke, passe, seeme, teache, thanke, thinke, tooke (preterite), and waulke; in the adjectives certaine, fewe, fitte, fonde, lewde or leude, lothe, meane, olde, poore, shrewde, and sweete; and in the adverbs againe, agoe, cheife (sic), and doune. On the other hand, this final e is absent from some words where it is now regularly found. Come and become, for example, appear as cum and becum, and tongue as tong.
In the chaos which came over the spelling in consequence of the uncertainty attached to the sound of the vowels, the final e was seized upon as a sort of help to indicate the pronunciation. Its office in this respect was announced as early as the end of the sixteenth century; at least, then it was announced that an unsounded e at the end of a word indicated that the preceding vowel was long. This, it hardly need be said, is a crude and unscientific method of denoting pronunciation. It is a process purely empirical. It is far removed from the ideal that no letter should exist in a word which is not sounded. Yet, to some extent, this artificial makeshift has been and still is a working principle. Were it carried out consistently it might be regarded as, on the whole, serving a useful purpose. But here, as well as elsewhere, the trail of the orthographic serpent is discoverable. Here, as elsewhere, it renders impossible the full enjoyment of even this slight section of an orthographic paradise. Here, as elsewhere, manifests itself the besetting sin of our spelling, that there is no consistency in the application of any principle. Some of our most common verbs violate the rule (if rule it can be called), such as have, give, love, are, done. In these the preceding vowel is not long but short. There are further large classes of words ending in ile, ine, ite, ive, where this final e would serve to mislead the inquirer as to the pronunciation had he no other source of information than the spelling.
Still, in the case of some of these words the operation of this principle has had, and is doubtless continuing to have, a certain influence. Take, for instance, the word hostile. In the early nineteenth century, if we can trust the most authoritative dictionaries, this word was regularly pronounced in England as if spelled hos’-tĭl. So it is to-day in America. But the influence of the final e has tended to prolong, in the former country, the sound of the preceding i. Consequently, a usual, and probably the usual, pronunciation there is hos-tīle. We can see a similar tendency manifested in the case of several other adjectives. A disposition to give many of them the long diphthongal sound of the i is frequently displayed in the pronunciation of such words as agile, docile, ductile, futile, infantile. Save in the case of the last one of this list, the dictionaries once gave the ile nothing but the sound of il; now they usually authorize both ways.
Were the principle here indicated fully carried out, pronunciations now condemned as vulgarisms would displace those now considered correct. In accordance with it, for instance, engine, as it is spelled, should strictly have the i long. One of the devices employed by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit to ridicule what he pretended was the American speech was to have the characters pronounce genuine as gen-u-īne, prejudice as prej-u-dīce, active and native as ac-tȳve and na-tīve. Doubtless he heard such pronunciations from some men. Yet, in these instances, the speaker was carried along by the same tendency which in cultivated English has succeeded in turning the pronunciation hos-tĭl into hos-tīle. Were there any binding force in the application of the rule which imparts to the termination e the power of lengthening the preceding vowel, no one would have any business to give to it in the final syllable of the words just specified any other sound than that of “long i.” The pronunciations ridiculed by Dickens would be the only pronunciations allowable. Accordingly, the way to make the rule universally effective is to drop this final e when it does not produce such an effect. If genuine is to be pronounced gen-u-ĭn, so it ought to be spelled.
For a long period, indeed, in the early history of our speech, whenever pronunciation changed, spelling was changed for the sake of denoting it properly. If a letter then became silent, it had no rights which any one felt bound to respect. It was incontinently dropped. No one needs to be told that this has all been changed in modern times. With us it has become both the belief and the practice that if a letter has once got into the spelling of a word, no matter how unlawfully, it has acquired the right of remaining there forever. In consequence, our language is encumbered with a lot of alphabetic squatters which have settled down upon the orthography without any regard to the opposing claims of either derivation or pronunciation. The mental attitude which at first tolerated and at last has learned to love these nuisances sprang up after the invention of printing. The influence of this art upon the spelling is something that cannot well be overestimated. Any confusion which might before have existed in it became from this time worse confounded. Upon the introduction of printing, indeed, English orthography entered into the realm of chaos and old night, in which it has ever since been floundering. Then it began to put on the shape it at present bears, “if shape it may be called which shape has none.”
The evil effects wrought on the orthography by printing, as contrasted with the previous method of manuscript reproduction, were largely due to the difference of conditions under which the two arts were carried on. The early type-setters, indeed, had to encounter the same difficulties which beset the copyists of manuscripts. There were among educated men the widest diversities of pronunciation. No established literary, still less established orthoepic standard, to which all felt obliged to conform, could possibly grow up during the long civil strife of the fifteenth century. Disorder and confusion, which in many cases had their origin as far back as the coming together in one tongue of two conflicting phonetic systems, continued to prevail to a great extent. But the copyists of manuscripts, compared with the type-setters who succeeded them, were men of education. Some degree of cultivation was essential to a profession which demanded as the first condition of success the ability to gain a clear conception of an author’s meaning. In accordance with the practice then universally prevailing, they would give to the word the spelling which to them represented the pronunciation. As educated men, this would be done in the majority of cases with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Still, that the copyists of manuscripts were a long way from reaching the highest ideal of excellence we know from incontestable authority. The corruption of the text caused by their wilfulness or carelessness was one of the few things that seem to have vexed the genial soul of the first great singer of our literature. Chaucer in his address to Adam, the scrivener, complains of the great trouble to which he is put in revising his works by the latter’s negligence. A fervent prayer is made that he may have a scalled head if he does not hereafter adhere to the original writing more closely. Toward the end of Troilus and Cryseyde there is, as Mr. Ellis remarked, something almost pathetic in his address to his “litel boke”
And for ther is so greet dyversitee
In Englissh and in writynge of our tonge,
So preye I God, that non myswrite thee,
Ne the mys-metere for defaut of tonge.
It is not likely that either imprecation or imploration had much effect upon the scribes of that day, who were probably as perverse a generation as the scribes of old. But one thing is to be said in their behalf. The cardinal principle that the proper office of orthography is to represent orthoepy they never lost sight of, however wofully they may have failed in carrying it into effect. Had this been consistently kept in view, the attainment of a reasonably complete correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, while it might have been long delayed, would have been sure to follow at last.