John Hart (spelling reformer)

John Hart (died 1574) was an English educator, grammarian, spelling reformer and officer of arms.

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 ("to vse as many letters in our writing, as we doe voyces or breathes in speaking, and no more ").

[4] For this purpose, he introduced six new phonetic consonant symbols for the sounds ð, θ, tʃ, dʒ, ʃ and syllabic l, as well as a system of diacritics for vowels.

Thus, for instance, Hart documents that the pronunciation of words that had Middle English long /iː/ but shifted to /aɪ/ in Modern English was still variable in his days, with some speakers retaining /iː/ in some words, but a diphthong /ɛɪ/ (spelled ei by Hart) already common in others.