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Colonial Planting As Language Seed
- English colonial projects in Ireland and North America began in Elizabeth I's early reign and planted cultural and linguistic seeds.
- These plantations and colonies created conditions for English to spread beyond Britain.
Anglo-Irish Language Mixing
- By the mid-1500s English largely vanished outside a few coastal towns in Ireland and fused with Gaelic in mixed speech.
- Anglo-Irish speech preserved older English words and showed heavy Gaelic influence.
Why Spelling Looked Unstable
- Mid-1500s English spelling had many holdover conventions like silent final -e from earlier grammatical endings.
- Printers also varied spellings to justify lines, so orthography remained inconsistent.