printform
Sound and form
It is generally agreed that the written form of anatural language is the orthographical record of the oral form. Logically the writtenform should agree with the oral form.In other words,the sound should be similar to the form.This is fairly true of English in its earliest Old English.The speech of the time was represented very much more faithfully in writing than it is today.With the development of the language,more and more differences occur between the two.
One reason for this is that the English alphabet was adopted from the Romans,and it does not have a separate letter to represent each sound in the language so that some letters must do double duty or work together in combination.
Another reason is that the pronunciation has changed more rapidly than spelling over the years,and in some cases the two have drawn far apart.In the last five hundred years,though the sounds of speech have changed considerably, there have been no corresponding changes in spelling.
A third reason is that some of the differences were created by professional scribes.In the eraly days the spelling differences did not matter very much as people were not so used to seeing words in print,and the spelling was not fixed as it is today.As a result,no one was quite sure how some English words should be spelled.Sometimes people deliberately changed spelling of words either to make a line even or for easier recognition.

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