HOTEL Lecture 6.2 — Middle English, and the Fixing of Spelling

After 1066, English was written down by scribes trained to write French — and English spelling has never recovered. This second video of Lecture 6 shows how sh, ch, qu, gh and the silent -e arrived without the sounds underneath them changing much at all, why busy, bury and merry are spelled and pronounced the way they are, and how Middle English ended up with two long e sounds and two long o sounds — which is the reason English writes both meet and meat. It closes with the two centuries in which printing and custom froze the spelling in place.