Spenser,
in the very first stanza of his Fairy Queen, says,
A gentle knight was pricking on the plain;
which knight, far from being tame and fearful, was so stout that
Nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.
To prove that we had impaired the energy of our language by false
refinement, he mentioned the following words, which, though
widely different in signification, are pronounced exactly in the
same manner wright, write, right, rite; but among the Scots,
these words are as different in pronunciation, as they are in
meaning and orthography; and this is the case with many others
which he mentioned by way of illustration. -- He, moreover, took
notice, that we had (for what reason he could never learn)
altered the sound of our vowels from that which is retained by
all the nations in Europe; an alteration which rendered the
language extremely difficult to foreigners, and made it almost
impracticable to lay down general rules for orthography and
pronunciation. Besides, the vowels were no longer simple sounds
in the mouth of an Englishman, who pronounced both i and u as
dipthongs. Finally, he affirmed, that we mumbled our speech with
our lips and teeth, and ran the words together without pause or
distinction, in such a manner, that a foreigner, though he
understood English tolerably well, was often obliged to have
recourse to a Scotchman to explain what a native of England had
said in his own language.
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