SIXTY WAYS OF SPELLING “NIGHT”.

SIXTY WAYS OF SPELLING “NIGHT”. Henry Hitchings has a review of David Crystal’s new book SPELL IT OUT, a History of English Spelling, in the Wall Street Journal (August 13). Hitchings praises Crystal’s gift for telling details, and gives as an example the fact that in the Middle Ages the “word night had 60 spellings—some simple (niht, nite) and others more forbidding (nyghtt, nhyht).” This is of interest because Crystal “notes that scribes in the Middle Ages wrote words as they were pronounced.” The sixty spellings are a record of local accents and give evidence of the variety of dialects which would have existed in England, comparable to the 55 major dialects and hundreds of subdialects found in France in the 1800’s, as I posted on here.