A few years ago, I did some research into linguistics – the study of language, its history and how we learn it. This led me to a history of spelling, how we came to have the odd spellings we do in so many words, and how many people have tried to simplify our spelling into something approaching phonetics.

Except for a few successes, like Sox, for Red Sox or White Sox in Chicago, remnants of a Chicago Tribune’s editor’s attempt to simplify spelling, or color instead of colour and theater instead of theatre, from Daniel Webster’s attempts to simplify and distinguish American English from British English when he authored the first American dictionary, most attempts to simplify spelling have failed.

So, I was surprised to notice recently that a whole category of words, in my lifetime, have slowly been simplified. I was listening to a college lecture from The Teaching Company, Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life, in which the professor pronounced the name Aeschylus, as though it started with a long “e”. I realized that it probably was similar to Aesop, which is similarly pronounced, but I had never heard anyone say Aeschylus before.

And, then, I started thinking about the fact that Aesop used to be spelled Æsop, and, by the way, why isn’t it spelled this way anymore and, is there a list of words that may be spelled with a ligature?

Commonly called ligatures, as though the two letters were bound together, and sometimes called additional letters, the “ae” combination, also called æsch or ash, and the “oe” combination used to be rendered as “æ” and “œ.”

Whether or not they changed because of desktop publishing, a theory advanced in explanation, the fact is Wikipedia lists 96 words that have been spelled with “ae” and 36 that have been spelled with “oe.”

Many have gone through a two-step spelling simplification. First, the letters “ae” were separated, instead of sharing the rounded portion of each letter, the ligature. Then, a single vowel was selected to replace the double vowel combination.  Thus, we had Æther, then Aether, now ether. We had anæmia, then anaemia, and now, anemia. Even plurals have sometimes been simplified. Thus, originally antennæ, then antennae, and now, antennas.

Caesar (Cæsar) has not quite made the transition to Cesar. But, daemon (dæmon) has transformed to demon, formulae (formulæ) to formulas, and faerie (færie) to fairy.

Obviously, some of this transition happened before I was aware. I defy anyone who grew up on the Micky Mouse Club, like I did, to spell “encyclopedia” without singing it. But, The Encyclopædia Britannica, an American company, made a marketing decision to retain the old spelling so they would look British.

The “oe” list isn’t quite as long. But, I remember seeing amœba in high school biology, now amoeba. I learned how to make hors d’œuvres, now hors d’oeuvres. I read about the Œdipus complex, now Oedipus. I learned what a supœna, now subpoena, was from watching Ironside, a television show about policemen and lawyers, a precursor to today’s Law and Order.

I was always an excellent speller, not Spelling Bee champion-level, but excellent, and a bit arrogant about it. So, I was amused to find out, as an adult, that spelling rules aren’t as hard and fast as I had always thought. In fact, spelling, in English, is by consensus. That is, what people consistently use is what is right. We do not have an academy ruling on what the right spelling is, and there are those who believe that our language has been able to evolve quickly and dominate precisely because there is no academic institution slowing it down. Rather, the market place dictates how people spell.

For those interested in how dictionaries get written in such a fluctuating environment, I highly recommend a book, The Professor and the Madman, describing how the first Oxford English Dictionary was created. I imagine they had encyclopædia in it and no one was singing it.