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 M¢30  Funded By Mahalo ? |  August 04, 2009 03:06 PM

Based on the standards of modern orthography (not the orthography of his day), how many words in Shakespeare's plays are misspelled?

The English language has evolved significantly since the late sixteenth century, the principle evolution that has taken place since then (as with any language) is that of its orthography; William Shakespeare, by the standards of his, our or any other time was one of the greatest writers ever, writing thirty-eight surviving plays, one hundred fifty-four sonnets and countless other poems, but he wrote using the orthography of his day; and it is there my question lies. The English language has evolved significantly since the late sixteenth century, the principle evolution that has taken place since then (as with any language) is that of its orthography; William Shakespeare, by the standards of his, our or any other time was one of the greatest writers ever, writing thirty-eight surviving plays, one hundred fifty-four sonnets and countless other poems, but he wrote using the orthography of his day; and it is there my question lies. Based on the standards of modern orthography (specifically not that of his day), of the tens of thousands of individual words in Shakespeare's plays, how many of them are misspelled?
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August 04, 2009 04:15 PM
About 20%. His plays include roughly a million words, so that would be about 200,000 misspellings.

I arrived at that figure by taking some random extracts from the First Folio and counting up the misspellings with a spell checker. (I didn't include proper names.)

Strictly speaking, you're looking at the spelling of the editors of the Folio rather than Shakespeare himself. We have very little in Shakespeare's own hand, much of which is his own signature. But given that he never spelled his own name the same way twice, it's pretty likely his spelling would be pretty bad by modern standards.

(Of course Shakespeare was writing before the first real dictionaries and the whole idea of standard orthography hadn't really been invented yet.)
Source(s):
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/00ws110.txt

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August 04, 2009 07:14 PM
I disagree with your basic premise. What primarily changes over time is pronunciation. The written version of the language changes more obviously because we can read old texts; but, audio recordings have only been around for just over a century. Scholars of language have been able to deduce the pronunciation changes and both vowels and consonants change over time, in addition to the individual words. Even in modern times, one can hear the continuing changes in pronunciation by listening to movies from different decades.

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