The Phonetic Alphabet of the Elizabethan Period

When the printing press was invented, it became a common practice to link the two U's together. That was really the point at which W started to emerge as a separate letter of the alphabet. In his commentaries about English and the need for a phonetic spelling system, John Hart used letters W and Y when he did that. When he wrote his phonetic transcriptions, he abandoned those letters. He only used U and I for the sounds that we've been exploring in this episode.