By standardizing English in 1476, Caxton froze our orthography during a time of linguistic flux. Our spellings today are therefore anchored to a pronunciation spoken sometime between Chaucer and Shakespeare, back when we voiced the S in aisle, the G in gnarl, and the K in knife. Over the next 600 years, we gradually silenced these letters in our speech, and yet there they remain on the page—echoes of an old pronunciation, fixed in time by Caxton’s press, confounding kindergarteners into the twenty-first century.
