American Language Supplement 2
Page 43
Davis’s scheme greatly resembles that of Hayes, but it is less a formal and complete plan than a call for action. Not disheartened by the collapse of the Simplified Spelling Board, he argues that it is high time to make another attack upon “the pathetic unreasonableness, the archaic anarchy, the Gothic gargoyles of our present set-up,” and he believes that the language pedagogues of the nation are bound in honor to make it. He advises them to begin by bedevilling the Legislatures of their respective States. “Get some solon,” he says,
to formulate a bill and some soft-hearted legislator to offer it this year, next year and sempiternally, with modified frills, until the people at the Capitol see they have some Pankhursts on their hands. Far be it for me to say what the bill should contain. I wouldn’t know. But the school-book approach seems a good one.… Even bad publicity may be better than none. Better the doghouse than Nirvana.
Davis suggests that the short or unstressed vowels be left as they are, and that the long ones, when stressed, be indicated either by adding e to them or by putting lines above them. He proposes to omit silent vowels, to indicate the a of father by ä, aa or ah, to reduce the variant spellings of mood, do and prove to one oo, to choose either the ou of pout or the ow of cow to represent the diphthong of both, and to settle on ur, er or ir to represent the sound in turn, her and sir. He is willing to let one letter serve for the u of unit and duty, but is uncertain what it should be. He asks for help with the a of father, and is stumped by the problem of distinguishing between the u of tub and that of push. When he comes to the consonants, he proposes to omit all that are silent, as in thumb, yacht, psalm and wrong.1 He favors changing the hard c to k before e and i, but leaving it elsewhere; in his next paragraph he proposes to leave it before e and i when it has the s-sound, and to use s elsewhere. For the th in breath he suggests th, and for that in breathe, dh. To distinguish between the ng of singer and that of finger he apparently favors making the latter ng, but is willing to keep plain ng in both cases and endure the present confusion. Again, he proposes turning the x of extra into ks and that of exist into gz, but does not object seriously to keeping the present x in both.2
Beside such all-out reformers there are many who are willing to go a longer or shorter distance along the way, usually in the wake of the Simplified Spelling Board. The case of the Chicago Tribune up to the end of 1935 was reported in AL4.3 Since then it has done some dizzy wobbling. Early in 1936 it reiterated its devotion to the new spellings it had introduced in 1934, e.g., fantom, harken, aile, bailif, burocracy, herse, hefer, lether and yern, but warned its readers that it would have to proceed slowly. Then, on March 26, 1939, it announced surprisingly that it was abandoning its programme and promised to sin no more. It went on:
We’re saying good-by to simplified spelling. We hope that no hassocs will be shied in our direction as we make our way down the aile to the mourners’ bench.… There was rime and reason for every alteration. And yet we were deluged with protests.… We stood pat for five years, but now we cannot overlook the obvious fact that everybody except us continues to write heifer and leather and that goes for those who applauded as well as those who cursed the innovation.1
But while this sad editorial was on the press there was another shift of mind in the Tribune office, and in later editions its title was changed from “Lacky, Pass the Hemloc” to “Not Yet the Hemloc,” and a paragraph announcing that the eighty-odd words on its list of 1931 were being abandoned was omitted. A week later followed the announcement of a compromise with death. Some of the more alarming of the spellings on the 1934 list, e.g., aile, bailif, hammoc, jaz, hefer, lether, rifraf and yern, were definitely doomed to the bone-yard, but forty-four were to be given a further trial. They included agast, analog, bagatel, burocracy, cotilio, definitly, demagog, etiquet, genuinly, sherif, tarif, trafic and warant. “Experience has shown,” said the Tribune, “that spellings like crum, lether, herse and quil have made little or no progress in the last five years. Our own writers and compositors have not become fully accustomed to these forms.… Perhaps the dropping of one of the f’s in sherif and tarif is a little too sensible to be adopted generally, but we’re going to give them a longer trial, and see what happens.”2 In 1946 it tried another nibble by adding frate to its list, and soon afterward it followed with telegraf and geografy. It also declared for tho, thru and altho. On August 73 it reported that it was “still too early to say how well or ill they have been received,” but that it hoped that its readers, “including the editors of other publications, will come to accept the changes.”4 Alas, the only other paper to show any sign of emulation was the Tribune’s daughter, the New York Daily News. But the Daily News has gone little beyond nite, alright, foto, fotog and fotographer, in all of which the influence of Variety seems to be quite as palpable as that of the Tribune. For some reason unknown, it boggles at fotografer.5
Dr. Louise Pound long ago suggested that the spelling reform movement in the United States, if it had very little effect upon standard spelling, may have at least fanned the craze for whimsical spellings which still rages, especially among advertisement writers. An early stage of the craze was visible in the name of the Ku Klux Klan, organized in 1865, but the original Klan did not use all the strange nomenclature that marked its successor of 1920, e.g., klavern, kleagle, klonvocation, kloran, klaliff and kludd. Dr. Pound recalled that Walt Whitman was curiously attracted to k, and cited his Kanada and Kanadian.1 In two previous papers2 she had listed a large number of unorthodox spellings in American trade-names, e.g., holsum (bread), nuklene (shoe whitening), porosknit (underwear), fits-u, keen-kutter (cutlery), kiddie-klothes, kum-a-part (cuff buttons), klearflax (linen rugs), klenzo (tooth paste), az-nu (automobile enamel), kutzit (soap), slipova (children’s garments), kroflite (golf balls), da-nite (bed), evertite (bags and purses), sunbrite (cleanser), eatmor (chocolates), kantleek (hot-water bottle), veribest (canned goods), quick-shyn (shoe polish), neu-tone (paint) and cof gums (medicated gum-drops). One of the first of the long series was uneeda, introduced as the name of a cracker in 1898. Thirty-one years later, writing in American Speech,1 Donald M. Alexander listed many more substitutions of u for you, e.g., u-put-it-on (weather strip), wear-u-well (clothing), u-otto-buy (used cars), u-bet-u (candy), u-serve (canned goods), protectu (a device for protecting checks), while-u-wait, drive-ur-self (cars for hire)2 and u-do-it (graining compound), and argued that U in the second person is just as respectable as I in the first, which did not come in until after 1400. He reported that the roadside maps in Wayne county, Mich., indicated the passing automobilist’s position by arrows bearing the legend U Are Here.
Meanwhile, Variety and its imitators continue to generate and disseminate a large number of simplified spellings of their own, e.g., laff (laugh);3 ayem (A.M.); nabe as an abbreviation of neighborhood, extended to a neighborhood movie parlor; whodunit (who done it?), a mystery story or film; burlesk and vodvil.4 Hollywood seems to have been responsible for the reduction of and to ’n, as in sit ’n eat, park ’n dine and dunk ’n dine,5 and perhaps also for cash ’n carry, prun (prune), hiway, pare (pear) and traler (trailer).6 The substitution of x for cks is apparently of respectable age in the United States. Sox for socks has become almost universal, as in White Sox,7 and Maury Maverick tells me that sax for sacks and tax for tacks are widely used among lumbermen. Slax for slacks was reported by one of the scouts of American Speech in 1936, when it was still a novelty,8 but Louise Pound reported trunx, chix and inx in 1925.9 Variety uses crix as an abbreviation of critics, and drinx is reported from England.10 Variety always reduces show to sho, and is fond of shobiz.11 Shocard is in common use. Donut is now so widely accepted that there is a Donut Institute and in 1942 it proclaimed a National Donut Week beginning October 25, the twenty-fifth anniversary “of the making of the first donut by Salvation Army lassies in France in World War I.”1 The Jones Metabolism Equipment Company of Chicago uses graf in advertising the Jones Motor-Basal Metabolism Unit;2 in Baltimore, in 1945, a drug-store wa
s announcing McNificent food,3 and at Essex, Md., there is (or was in 1946), a Raynbo Inn. Perhaps such whimsical forms as izzatso, nuf sed, betcha, damfino and helluva are too painfully familiar to need mention. To the same class probably belongs Wanna Noit, the name of “an extension culture club in a Western town.”4 Ho-made was first found in the Middle West in 19275 and has since made considerable progress. Now and then there is a nostalgic return to Bach. In 1946 the New Yorker reported6 that the Kwik Products Company, of West Twenty-Eighth street, was also listed in the Manhattan Telephone Directory as the Quick Products Company.7
The collapse of the Simplified Spelling Board has put an end to organized and large scale agitation for spelling reform in the Republic, but at the same stroke it has helped to revive and restimulate the same great moral movement in England. This needs a little explaining. As I have hitherto noted, the angel of the Board, from its organization in 1906 until his death in 1919, was Andrew Carnegie. He started off by allowing it $15,000 a year but soon raised this subsidy to $25,000, and during his thirteen angelic years it saw, altogether, the color of $283,000 of his money. When it was found that he had forgotten it in his will the Board began to droop, but not long afterward it felt the kiss of fresh hope, for news seeped in that a rich British shipbuilder, Sir George Burton Hunter, had become violently interested in Simplified Spelling, and was resolved to promote it through the English speaking world.8 Sir George began by appointing “a personal secretary, Mr. T. R. Barber, to look after this side of his work,”1 and presently the Simplified Spelling Society, the English opposite number to the American Simplified Spelling Board, was pleasantly in funds, and full of new zeal. On August 18, 1922, he set up a trust fund for its benefit, running for ten years, and when the ten years expired they were extended to sixteen. The terms of the trust provided that at the end of that time the trustees should divide the capital between the Society and “any other society or societies, association or associations” then “in existence or hereafter to come into existence” that had precisely the same objects. This trust finally expired in 1938, and meanwhile Sir George had died in 1937, at the age of ninety-two.
The trustees were then confronted with the question, Who should get the money? Should it all go to the Simplified Spelling Society, or should it be divided between the Society and some other organization or organizations, say, the Simplified Spelling Board? The trustees, unable to decide, appealed to the courts for guidance, and on March 1, 1939, the case came before Mr. Justice Bennett in the High Court of Justice, Chancery Division. The judge asked for expert evidence, and it was provided by Dr. Daniel Jones, professor of phonetics at the University of London, and Isaac James Pitman (later M.P.), grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman (1813–1897), inventor of the system of shorthand bearing his name.2 Jones testified that “the Simplified Spelling Board of America” had “ceased to exist,” and that the Simplified Spelling Society “was the only society of its kind in the world with which he was acquainted.” Pitman swore that “he knew of no society with objects similar.” Mr. Justice Bennett thereupon decided that the simplified Spelling Society should get all the money, and the trustees turned over to it £ 18,200.1 At once it began bringing out a long series of books and pamphlets in promotion of the cause, and it has been doing so ever since.
These publications show that the Society hopes to reform English spelling without bringing in any new characters, without putting accents on any of the existing letters (save the dieresis to separate successive vowels, as we use it now), and without departing from the more obvious phonetic values. It proposes to substitute dh for the th of father, but is willing to let th stand as it is in thing. It uses zh for the French j-sound, substitutes k for hard c in all cases, and uses ur wherever er or ir is now used in its place, e.g., urmin (ermine) and thurd (third).2 Hard g remains, but soft g is displaced by j. The consonants b, d, f, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y and z are unchanged, and ch and sh are used as now. The present vowels retain their short sounds; their other sounds are indicated by simple devices. The long a of father becomes aa; the long o of lower, oe; the long u of moon, uu; the a of made, ae. The long e is always ee. The diphthongs are indicated substantially as now; the palatal glide by putting e after, not before, the u. The sound of eye becomes ie. S, whenever it is sounded as z, is written z. Silent letters are dropped. Useless doublings are reduced to single letters. What all this comes to is shown by the following:
We instinktivly shrink from eny chaenj in whot iz familyar; and whot kan be mor familyar dhan dhe form ov wurdz dhat we hav seen and riten mor tiemz dhan we kan posibly estimaet? We taek up a book printed in Amerika, and honor and center jar upon us every tiem we kum akros dhem; nae, eeven to see forever in plaes ov for ever atrackts our atenshon in an unplezant wae. But dheez ar isolaeted kaesez; think ov dhe meny wurdz dhat wood hav to be chaenjd if eny real impruuvment wer to rezult. At dhe furst glaans a pasej in eny reformd speling looks “kweer” and “ugly.” Dhis objekshon iz aulwaez dhe furst to be maed; it iz purfektly natuerel; it iz dhe hardest to remuuv. Indeed, its efekt iz not weekend until dhe nue speling iz noe longger nue, until it has been seen ofen enuf to be familyar.3.
Happily, the shock to Britons on encountering the American honor is evaded by going the whole hog to onor, labor is disguised as laebor, and color becomes kulor, which seems somehow less obscene than color. In the same way center is toned down to senter and meter to meeter, but there is no way to get round the abhorrent theater. There are some logical but startling interchanges: tyre becomes tier, and tier becomes teer. The tho of the Simplified Spelling Board becomes dhoe and its thru becomes thruu. To, too and two are alike tuu. At first glance, the new system simply looks like “bad” spelling, but it must be said for it that even its most radical innovations, like those of “bad” spelling itself, are usually readily fathomed, e.g., hedkworterz, kwintesens, proelonggaeshon, forkloesher, miselaenyus and aproksimaet.1
In England, as in the United States, there are many lone-wolf spelling reformers. The earliest recorded was a monk named Ormin, who lived and suffered at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century.2 Many later English authors of the classical line made attempts to regulate and improve the spelling of their time, notably John Milton, who used sovran for sovereign,3 glimse for glimpse, hight for height, and thir for their.4 Swift seems to have been against simplified spelling, as Samuel Johnson was, and in 1712 denounced the “foolish opinion, advanced of late years, that we ought to spell exactly as we speak,”1 but Southey somehow found authority in him for tho’, thro’ and altho’.2
As everyone knows, George Bernard Shaw, in his heyday as a reformer, maintained a department of reformed spelling in his vast and bizarre Utopia. But save for a few somewhat banal innovations, e.g., havn’t, program, novelet, and Renascence, most of which were not really innovations at all,3 he stuck closely to standard English spelling in his own writing, and even indulged himself in a few archaisms, e.g., to shew.4 In theory, however, he was always in favor of very radical changes, including the abolition of silent letters and the adoption of an entirely new alphabet. In a letter to the London Times in 19455 he disported himself with the word bomb. The redundant b, he argued, “is entirely senseless and wastes the writer’s time,” and suggests “an absurd mispronunciation of the word exactly as if the word gun were to be spelt gung.” He reported that he had made an experiment with bom, and found that he could write it twenty-four times in one minute, whereas he could write bomb but eighteen times. He proposed that the British government appoint a committee of economists and statisticians to deal with the matter, and closed by saying that “if the Phoenician alphabet were only turned upside down and enlarged by seventeen letters from the Greek alphabet it would soon pay for the war.” Some months later, in an interview with Hayden Church, he explained that this new alphabet should have “at least forty-two letters, capable of indicating every sound in our speech without using more than one letter for each sound.”6 “The yearly cost of having to write my name with four lett
ers instead of two,” he went on, “is astronomical. The saving would repay the cost of the atomic bomb in a few months.” But this argument was quickly demolished by Simeon Strunsky and Dr. Charles E. Funk in the New York Times. “Assume,” said Strunsky, “that he saved himself 25 per cent. of time in writing. What percentage would it cost his readers whose eyes would pause constantly to puzzle out many strange spellings?”1 Said Funk:
Shaw wants to build a spelling reform upon pronunciation. That would be disastrous. Whose pronunciation would be the criterion? He naïvely suggests, broadly, “British pronunciation.” As if all Britishers spoke any more alike than do all Americans! He cites bomb as his pet peeve. But, for the record, how does Shaw pronounce bomb? Many Britishers, especially the older generation, would phonetically spell it bum, according to the various British dictionaries on my shelves. That was the way the poet Southey pronounced it, but the poet Young called it boom, by analogy with tomb, while the earlier poet Matthew Prior called it boam, by analogy with comb.2
Another of England’s fans for simplified spelling is William Barkley, one of Lord Beaverbrook’s chief aides on the London Daily Express. His interest in the holy cause was first aroused by the late R. E. Zachrisson’s Anglic scheme in the early 30s,3 but he now seems to favor the rather simpler and more logical plan of the Simplified Spelling Society, though with some changes of his own. For one thing, he rejects the use of dh for the sound of th in that, and sticks to th in both words of the that-class and those of the think-class. Again, he rejects the Society’s doubling of intervocalic r, as in authorrity. But in general he goes along, even when it comes to substituting k for c – for long a sign and symbol of extreme unenlightenment in English folklore, as in American. “There is,” he admits, “a prejudice against k. Many people