Even in ardour, armour, candour, endeavour, favour, honour, labour, odour, parlour, rigour, rumour, saviour, splendour, tumour and vapour, where the u has some color of right to appear, it is doubtful whether its insertion has much value as suggesting French derivation, for in the case of twelve of these words the ordinary reader would be quite certain to have in mind only the modern spelling — ardeur, armure, candeur, faveur, honneur, labeur, odeur, rigueur, rumeur, splendeur, tumeur and vapeur — which have the u indeed but no o (and why should not one of these letters be dropped as well as the other?) — while endeavour, parlour and saviour come from old French words that are themselves without the u — devoir, parleor and saveor. The u in all these words is therefore either useless or positively misleading. And finally in the case of colour, clamour, fervour, humour, rancour, valour and vigour, it is to be remarked that the exact American orthography actually occurs in old French! “Finally,” I said, but that is not quite the end of British absurdity with these -our -or words. Insistent as our transatlantic cousins are on writing arbour, armour, clamour, clangour, colour, dolour, flavour, honour, humour, labour, odour, rancour, rigour, savour, valour, vapour and vigour, and “most unpleasant” as they find the omission of the excrescent u in any of these words, they nevertheless make no scruple of writing the derivatives in the American way — arboreal, armory, clamorous, clangorous, colorific, dolorous, flavorous, honorary, humorous, laborious, odorous, rancorous, rigorous, savory, valorous, vaporize and vigorous — not inserting the u in the second syllable of any one of these words. The British practice is, in short and to speak plainly, a jumble of confusion, without rhyme or reason, logic or consistency; and if anybody finds the American simplification of the whole matter “unpleasant,” it can be only because he is a victim of unreasoning prejudice against which no argument can avail.
If the u were dropped in all derivatives, the confusion would be less, but it is retained in many of them, for example, colourable, favourite, misdemeanour, coloured and labourer. The derivatives of honour exhibit clearly the difficulties of the American who essays to write correct English. Honorary, honorarium and honorific drop the u, but honourable retains it. Furthermore, the English make a distinction between two senses of rigor. When used in its pathological sense (not only in the Latin form of rigor mortis, but as an English word) it drops the u; in all other senses it retains the u.
In Canada the two orthographies, English and American, flourish side by side. By an Order-in-Council of 1890, official correspondence must show the English spelling, and in 1931 the Canadian Historical Association, the Canadian Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Canada joined in urging its use by every loyal Canadian.31 But though it is ordained in all the -our words in “Preparation of Copy For the Printer,” issued by the King’s Printer at Ottawa,32 there are, in that pamphlet, various other concessions to American usage. The English aluminium, for example, is to be used in scientific documents, but the American aluminum is permitted in commercial writing. Cipher, dryly, jail, net, program and wagon are to be spelt in the American manner, and even alright is authorized. Nearly all the Canadian newspapers use the American spelling and it is also taught in most of the public schools, which are under the jurisdiction, not of the Dominion government, but of the provincial ministers of education. In Australia the English spelling is official, but various American forms are making fast progress. According to the Triad (Sydney), “horrible American inaccuracies of spelling are coming into common use” in the newspapers out there; worse, the educational authorities of Victoria authorize the use of the American -er ending. This last infamy has been roundly denounced by Sir Adrian Knox, Chief Justice of the Commonwealth, and the Triad has displayed a good deal of colonial passion in supporting him. “Unhappily,” it says, “we have no English Academy to guard the purity and integrity of the language. Everything is left to the sense and loyalty of decently cultivated people.” But even the Triad admits that American usage, in some instances, is “correct.” It is, however, belligerently faithful to the -our ending. “If it is correct or tolerable in English,” it argues somewhat lamely, “to write labor for labour, why not boddy for body, steddy for steady, and yot for yacht?” Meanwhile, as in Canada, the daily papers slide into the Yankee orbit.
3. THE SIMPLIFIED SPELLING MOVEMENT
Franklin’s “Scheme For a New Alphabet and Reformed Mode of Spelling” was by no means the first attempt to revise and rationalize English orthography. So long ago as the beginning of the Thirteenth Century a monk named Ormin tried to reform the spelling of the Middle English of his time. The chief difficulty then encountered was in distinguishing between long vowels and short ones, and Ormin proposed to get rid of it by doubling the consonants following the latter. Thus he spelled fire, fir, and fir, firr. His proposal got no support, and the manuscript in which he made it lay in obscurity for six centuries, but when it was exhumed at last it turned out to be very useful to philologians, for it threw a great deal of light upon early Middle English pronunciation. Thus, the fact that Ormin spelled God as we do showed that the word was then rhymed with load, and the fact that he spelled goddspell (gospel) with two d’s showed that a shorter o was beginning to prevail in the derivative.
Ormin was followed after three and a half centuries by Sir John Cheke (1514–57), the first regius professor of Greek at Cambridge. Middle English had passed out by that time, and Modern English was in, but many survivals of the former were still encountered, including a host of now-useless final e’s. Sir John proposed to amputate all of them. He also proposed to differentiate between the short and long forms of the same vowels by doubling the latter. Finally, he proposed to get rid of all silent consonants, thus making doubt, for example, dout, and turning fault into faut, for it was so pronounced at that time.33 Cheke was supported in his reforms by a number of influential contemporaries, including Roger Ascham, but English went on its wild way. In 1568 another attempt to bring it to rule was made by Sir Thomas Smith, one of his friends and colleagues at Cambridge. Smith’s proposals were published in a Latin work entitled “De Recta et Emendata Linguæ Anglicanæ Scriptione,” and the chief of them was that the traditional alphabet be abandoned and a phonetic alphabet substituted. A century later the Rev. John Wilkins, then Dean of Ripon and later Bishop of Chester, came forward with another phonetic alphabet — this time of about 450 characters! But though Wilkins argued for it very learnedly on physiological grounds, printing many engravings to show the action of the tongue and palate, it seems to have made no impression on his contemporaries, and is now forgotten save by antiquarians. Nor was any greater success made by his numerous successors. They framed some very apt and pungent criticisms of English orthography and projected a number of quite reasonable reforms, but they had little hand in the determination of actual spelling practise. That was mainly the work of printers, and after 1650 their rules began to be accepted by English authors, and most of them remain in force to this day.34 Since Franklin’s time the literature of the subject has taken on large proportions, and contributions to it have been made by all sorts of persons, ranging from scientific philologians to fanatics of the sort who project new religions and new political economies.35 In the last century the most noise was made by Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of the system of shorthand bearing his name. In the early 40’s, in association with Alexander J. Ellis, he proposed a new phonetic alphabet of forty letters, and during the years following he made vigorous propaganda for it in his Phonographic Journal, and through the Phonetic Society, which he organized in 1843.
But the real father of the Simplified Spelling movement was probably Noah Webster. The controversy over his new spelling, described in the last section, aroused a great deal of public interest in the subject, and in the early 70’s even the dons of the American Philological Association began to give it some attention. In 1875 they appointed a committee consisting of Professors Francis A. March of Lafayette College, W. D. Whitney and J. Hammond Trumbell of Yale, S. S. Haldeman
of the University of Pennsylvania, and F. J. Child of Harvard to look into it, and in 1876 this committee reported that a revision of spelling was urgent and that something should be done about it. Specifically, they proposed that eleven new spellings be adopted at once, to wit, ar, catalog, definit, gard, giv, hav, infinit, liv, tho, thru and wisht. During the same year there was an International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography at Philadelphia, with several delegates from England present, and out of it grew the Spelling Reform Association, which immediately endorsed the eleven new spellings of the five professors. Three years later a similar body was organized in England, with A. H. Sayce, deputy professor of comparative philology at Oxford as its president, and Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, Sir Isaac Pitman, Sir John Lubbock, and such eminent philologians as J. A. H. Murray, W. W. Skeat and Henry Sweet among its vice-presidents. The Philological Society of England and the American Philological Association kept a friendly watch upon the progress of events. In 1880 the former issued a pamphlet advising various “partial corrections of English spellings,” and in 1886 the latter followed with recommendations affecting about 3500 words, and falling under ten headings. Most of the new forms listed had been put forward years before by Webster, and some of them had entered into unquestioned American usage in the meantime, e.g., the deletion of the u from the -our words, the substitution of er for re at the end of words, and the reduction of traveller to traveler.
The trouble with the others was that they were either too uncouth to be adopted without a long struggle or likely to cause errors in pronunciation. To the first class belonged tung for tongue, ruf for rough, batl for battle and abuv for above, and to the second such forms as each for catch and troble for trouble. The result was that the whole reform received a setback: the public dismissed the reformers as a pack of lunatics. Twelve years later the National Education Association revived the movement with a proposal that a beginning be made with a very short list of reformed spellings, and nominated the following twelve changes by way of experiment: tho, altho, thru, thruout, thoro, thoroly, thoro] are, program, prolog, catalog, pedagog and decalog. Then, in 1906, came the organization of the Simplified Spelling Board, with a subsidy of $15,000 a year from Andrew Carnegie (later increased to $25,000 a year), and a formidable list of members and collaborators, including Henry Bradley, F. I. Furnivall, C. H. Grandgent, W. W. Skeat, T. R. Lounsbury and F. A. March. The board at once issued a list of 300 revised spellings, new and old, and in August, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered their adoption by the Government Printing Office. But this effort to hasten matters aroused widespread opposition, and in a little while the spelling reform movement was the sport of the national wits. The Government Printing Office resisted, and so did most of the departments, and in the end the use of the twelve new spellings was confined to the White House. Not many American magazines or newspapers adopted them, and they were seldom used in printing books. When, in 1919, Carnegie died, his subsidy ceased,36 and since then the Simplified Spelling Board has moved from the glare of Madison avenue, New York, to the rural retirement of Lake Placid, and there has been a serious decline in its activities. During Carnegie’s lifetime it issued a great many bulletins and circulars, but since 1924 it has published nothing save a small magazine called Spelling — three issues in 1925 and four in 1931.37 In its heyday the board claimed that 556 American newspapers and other periodicals, with a combined circulation 18,000,000, were using the twelve simplified spellings of the National Education Association’s list and “most of the 300 simpler spellings” recommended by its own first list, and that 460 universities, colleges and normal-schools were either using most of these spellings “in their official publications and correspondence,” or permitting “students to use them in their written work.”38 But not many of these publications or educational institutions were of much importance. The Literary Digest led the very short list of magazines of national circulation, and the Philadelphia North American led the newspapers. With regard to the colleges, the situation in Massachusetts was perhaps typical. Three institutions had adopted the new spelling — Clark College, Emerson College and the International Y.M.C.A. College. But Harvard was missing, and so were the Massachusetts Tech, Wellesley, Smith and Boston University.
The board issued various lists of reformed spellings from time to time, and in 1919 it brought out a Handbook of Simplified Spelling summarizing its successive recommendations. They were as follows:
1. When a word begins with or includes œ or œ substitute e: esthetic, medieval, subpena. But retain the dipthong at the end of a word: alumnœ
2. When bt is pronounced t, drop the silent b: det, dettor, dout.
3. When ceed is final spell it cede: excede, procede, succede.
4. When ch is pronounced like hard c, drop the silent h except before e, i and y: caracter, clorid, corus, cronic, eco, epoc, mecanic, monarc, scolar, scool, stomac, tecnical. But retain architect, chemist, monarchy.
5. When a double consonant appears before a final silent e drop the last two letters: bizar, cigaret, creton, gavot, gazet, giraf, gram, program, quartet, vaudevil.
6. When a word ends with a double consonant substitute a single consonant: ad, bil, bluf, buz, clas, dol, dul, eg, glas, les, los, mes, mis, pas, pres, shal, tel, wil. But retain ll after a long vowel: all, roll. And retain ss when the word has more than one syllable: needless.
7. Drop the final silent e after a consonant preceded by a short stressed vowel: giv, hav, liv.
8. Drop the final silent e in the common words are, gone and were: ar, gon, wer.
9. Drop the final silent e in the unstressed final short syllables, ide, ile, ine, ise, ite and ive: activ, bromid, definit, determin, practis, hostil.
10. Drop the silent e after lv and rv: involv, twelv, carv, deserv.
11. Drop the silent e after v or z when preceded by a digraph representing a long vowel or a diphthong: achiev, freez, gauz, sneez.
12. Drop the e in final oe when it is pronounced o: fo, ho, ro, to, wo. But retain it in inflections: foes, hoed.
13. When one of the letters in ea is silent drop it: bred, brekfast, hed, hart, harth.
14. When final ed is pronounced d drop the e: cald, carrid, employd, marrid, robd, sneezd, struggld, wrongd. But not when a wrong pronunciation will be suggested: bribd, cand, fild (for filed), etc.
15. When final ed is pronounced t substitute t: addrest, shipt, helpt, indorst. But not when a wrong pronunciation will be suggested: bakt, fact (for faced), etc.
16. When ei is pronounced like ie in brief substitute ie: conciet, deciev, wierd.
17. When a final ey is pronounced y drop the e: barly, chimny, donky, mony, vally.
18. When final gh is pronounced f substitute f and drop the silent letter of the preceding digraph: enuf, laf, ruf, tuf.
19. When gh is pronounced g drop the silent h: agast, gastly, gost, goul.
20. When gm is final drop the silent g: apothem, diafram, flem.
21. When gue is final after a consonant, a short vowel or a digraph representing a long vowel or a diphthong drop the silent ue: tung, catalog, harang, leag, sinagog. But not when a wrong pronunciation would be suggested: rog (for rogue), vag (for vague), etc.
22. When a final ise is pronounced ize substitute ize: advertize, advize, franchize, rize, wize.
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