John Wild of Littleleek, an early eighteenth-century spelling reformer, and the evolution of a new alphabet

Abstract

The eighteenth century has by and large been viewed as a period during which there was little attention paid to alphabet innovation as a mechanism for achieving the ‘visible speech’ required to represent and ultimately ‘fix’ the prescribed national standard of propriety in pronunciation with which it was obsessed. While there were several writers who sought to achieve a ‘one symbol-one-sound’ co-relation through an elaborate use of diacritic marks attached to the standard alphabet letter-set, with the exception of Thomas Spence and Abraham Tucker, there were very few who advocated the production of entirely new alphabets as a means of achieving this goal. John Wild, schoolmaster of Littleleek, Nottinghamshire, belongs to this symbol-innovating group. The small extant sample of his phonetic symbol system demonstrates a sophisticated and radical attempt to unambiguously match sound with symbol, one which provides important insights into both contemporary pronunciation and, uniquely, into one of its major regional manifestations.