Occasionally in older writing I come across the word “little” spelled l-e-e-t-l-e. The spelling is not meant to be taken as such, but rather to indicate a speech mannerism of the person being quoted. Two examples:
(1) there’s a political cartoon from Abraham Lincoln’s re-election campaign of 1864, and it shows Lincoln’s lilliputian opponent standing on Lincoln’s palm, and Lincoln says, “That reminds me of a leetle joke”.
(2) In a P.G. Wodehouse story, there’s a character who is the editor of a literary magazine, but still quails before his childhood school headmaster. The headmaster, who is supposed to be punctilious and demanding, is a contributor to the journal in question, and tells this editor that he wants his work to be displayed “a leetle more prominently” (italics in original).
What’s the deal? I couldn’t see anyone using this spelling, unless the character speaking has a foreign accent of some sort. But in the examples above, both are native English speakers. Or did people really use to pronounce the work like that at one time?
IANA linguistics specialist, but I have always assumed that people must have pronounced it that way somewhere, sometime, for some kind of exaggerated conversational effect, especially in the Wodehouse story (Plum Rocks 4 Ever! )
The way we sometimes spell “probably” as “probly” or “prolly”, for the effect.
You know when someone says “Just give me a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiitle more?” Apparently, “leetle” is how it is spelled. I had never thought of it as being spelled this way until I looked it up in the OED.
It explains your second example, but it seems a little incongruous with the Lincoln quote.
I think I’ve seen it used this way in Christie’s and Sayers’ novels, usually in a way that indicates that it’s a lower-middle-class person inching his/her way into respectability by adopting an exaggeratedly “genteel” pronunciation.
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