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Before the printing press was invented, the words in
handwritten texts had been spelled according to the dialect of

the scribe who wrote them. However, book production was slow
and few people could read in any case. The early printers used

the older spellings which Middle English scribes had used. They
didn't understand the significance of the pronunciation changes

that had just gotten well underway. By the time the vowel shift

was complete (about 100 years from start to finish), hundreds of
books had been printed with the older spellings. The new high

volume of book production combined with increasing literacy

proved to be powerful forces against spelling change. As a
consequence, many spellings have become "fixed" to the Middle

English pronunciation, rather than the modern ones, and we still
spell the word for the earth's satellite as "moon."

2. English Spelling

English is often said to have an unpredictable or chaotic
spelling system. Although things are probably not as bad as

some claim, the high frequency words with irregular spellings
does promote the impression that there is little correspondence

between sound and spelling. These reasons for the irregularities
are mainly historical:

Spelling problems began in the Old English period. English

scribes borrowed the Latin alphabet, which had 23 letters, and
tried to apply it to a language with nearly 40 different sounds.

Their solution was often to use combinations of letters to

indicate single sounds. So, the letter "t" represented the [t] sound
except when it was followed by "h".

After the Norman conquest, few documents were written in
English. Those that were written by scribes trained to write

Latin and French. They use the symbols with the sound values
that they were familiar with, not the ones that English scribes

had used previously. For example, the letter "c" was used by

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