John Hart was an English educator, grammarian, spelling reformer and officer of arms. He is best known for proposing a reformed spelling system for English, which has been described as "the first truly phonological scheme" in the history of early English spelling. Hart is the author of three known works on grammar and spelling: an unpublished manuscript from 1551 titled The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of Our Inglish Toung; a printed pamphlet titled An Orthographie, published in 1569; and a practical reading primer titled A Methode or Comfortable Beginning for All Unlearned, published in 1570. In these works, he criticises the contemporary spelling practices of his day as chaotic and illogical, and argues for a radically reformed orthography on purely phonological principles. His goal was to introduce a spelling system with a one-to-one relationship between sounds and symbols. For this purpose, he introduced six new phonetic consonant symbols for the sounds and syllabic l, as well as a system of diacritics for vowels. Long vowels were systematically marked by a dot below the letter, while the reduced vowelschwa was marked by ë.
Hart's symbol
Traditional spelling
Phonetic value
th
th
ch
soft g
sh
syllabic l
ạ
a
ẹ
e
ë
e
ị
i
ọ
oa, o
ụ
oo, u
Hart's work has been lauded by modern linguists for his highly insightful phonetic analysis of the Early Modern English of his days, and for his thoroughness in pursuing the phonetic principle. His discussion of vowel pronunciations is particularly interesting to historians of the English language, because it documents the spoken English at an intermediate point during the Great Vowel Shift, which during Hart's days was radically transforming the vowel system of English. Thus, for instance, Hart documents that the pronunciation of words that had Middle English long but shifted to in Modern English was still variable in his days, with some speakers retaining in some words, but a diphthong already common in others. The following passage from Hart's Orthographie, in his original spelling, illustrates the system. As an officer of arms, John Hart held the title of Chester Herald between 1566 and 1574.
