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/

3. What are the foundations of English codification? Contrast this with the situation of a different language.

Why? Because of a desire to fix the language in its ideal state
In 17th and 18th century, standard English was a part of nationalism which, with increasing levels of education, got into actual use
Codification was largely a prescriptivist project to "purify the language" affecting areas of pronunciation, grammar, spelling and vocabulary
It could be viewed as the elite imposing their language (and manners, which was believed to be connected) on others
The expectation of everyone abiding to the standard caused two problems: the need to extend English to users of other languages (Welsh) and the misapprehension that standard English correlates with intelligence and, which was partially true, with higher education
The prescribing of norm becomes more relevant as the language becomes more complex and has more aspirants to use its full potential
Desire to know the standard created a tradition of books of grammar and orthoepy and dictionaries, such as Samuel Johnson's "A Dictionary of English Language"
The dictionary used analogy and experience from renowned authors' work, nor as old as Chaucer, nor too recent
The main concerns in forming the standard were for example the new terms in language due to the influence of colonies and immigrants, class, gender, ethnicity, age and region all becoming important factors to language which had to be contained, grammaticalization of certain areas
At first there was a desire to make an academy (like it was the case of French) to take care of the language, but in the end the English relied on works of individual grammarians setting the standards
That made the language at first open to regionalisms because of bias but that was gone by the end of 17th century