John Hart

Who was John Hart?

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Hart is the author of three known works on grammar and spelling: an unpublished manuscript from 1551 titled The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of Our Inglish Toung; a printed pamphlet titled An Orthographie, published in 1569; and a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 vowel schwa was marked by ë.