
William Bullokar

William Bullokar was a 16th-century printer who devised a 40-letter phonetic alphabet for the English language. Its characters were in the black-letter or "gothic" writing style commonly used at the time. Taking as his model a Latin grammar by William Lily, Bullokar wrote the first published grammar of the English language, in a book titled "Brief Grammar for English", which appeared in 1586.