think it is Teutonic. How much there is in habit can be seen at once in the spelling of the town of Kanterbury. How harsh and Teutonic! Yet this is the same word as Kent, and what is more purely and sweetly English than Kent? I fought against k for a time, thinking we could retain the c in many words.… [But] k is magnificently clean and clear in print. It takes three times as long to write it in longhand as c, more’s the pity, but it will replace many conglomerations of ch, cq and ck. The addition of k to c in many words must have arisen because the printers felt c was not clear enough by itself. The dropping of k in such words as publick is one of the few spelling changes in the last two centuries, fought to the last ditch by Boswell.1 We will restore his k but drop his c: publik.2
The spelling reform movement in both the United States and England, in its early days, had the support of many of the most eminent philologists then in practise in the two countries, and also of many distinguished literati, but it has never made any progress, and there is little evidence that it will do better in the foreseeable future. In this country it has been handicapped by the fact that, to Americans, phonetic spelling always suggests the grotesqueries of the comic writers stretching from Seba Smith3 to Milt Gross, and by the further fact that popular interest in and respect for spelling prowess, fostered for more than a century by the peculiarly American institution of the spelling-bee, still survive more or less.4 Also, there is reason for believing that the ardent and tactless advocacy of the Simplified Spelling Board scheme by Roosevelt I in 1906 produced vastly more opposition than support, for Americans, in those days, had not yet got used to government by administrative fiat, and resented it violently whenever it touched what they regarded as their private affairs. Finally, the fact is not to be forgotten that the patronage of Andrew Carnegie, which was not confined to his subsidy but also included active propaganda,1 likewise irritated a tender nerve. He was then the richest man in the country, and memories of the Homestead strike of 1892 were still playing about him; it was not until some time later that he began to lose his diabolical character and to be admired by the underprivileged.
The advantages of spelling reform have always been greatly exaggerated by its exponents, many of whom have been notably over-earnest and under-humorous men. As I have noted, some of them and perhaps most of them have been advocates of other and even more dubious reforms. It is, indeed, rare to find a reformer who is content with but one sure-cure for the ills of humanity. Henry Holt, the publisher, one of the stout pillars of the Simplified Spelling Board, was also a spiritualist, and at no pains to conceal it. Sir George Hunter was a Scotch wowser who also whooped up Prohibition. George Bernard Shaw supported a dozen other arcana, ranging from parlor Socialism to vegetarianism. H. G. Wells toyed with Socialism, technocracy and Basic English. And so on down the line. As long ago as 1892 the old Spelling Reform Association was constrained to issue a warning that some of its members had “zeal without knowledge.” “One of the favorite fallacies of the human mind,” it said sadly, “is that whoever means well or engages in a good work is therefore entitled, no matter how incompetent, to the sympathy and aid of all good men.”2
Some of the favorite arguments of the reformers are so feeble as to be silly – for example, the argument that the new spelling would greatly reduce the labor of writing and the cost of paper and printing. This was first put into speculative statistics in 1849 by Alexander J. Ellis, who figured that the fearsome phonetic alphabet he was then advocating would result in a space saving of 17%. In 1878 J. H. Gladstone, then president of the English Spelling Reform Association, figured somewhat more modestly that “the mere removal of duplicated consonants would save 1.6% and of the mute e’s an additional 4%.”1 Such optimistic estimates always overlook the fact that many of the gains would be wiped out by compensatory losses. Thus the relatively mild scheme of the Simplified Spelling Society, though it reduces the seven letters of thought to the five of thaut and the six of the English honour to the four of onor, changes hundreds of other spellings without saving a single letter, e.g., hierling for hireling, pakt for pact, taterdemaely on for tatterdemalion, survae for survey, inadekwasy for inadequacy, and furn for fern, and in many other cases actually makes words longer, e.g., furmentaeshon for fermentation, florrist for florist, insuelaeshon for insulation, asoeshyaeshon for association, kuupae for coupe, eksersiez for exercise, and mateeryaliez for materialize.
The argument that phonetic spelling would be easier to learn than the present spelling is not supported by the known facts. In some cases it no doubt would be, but in plenty of other cases it would certainly not. Moreover, the number of “hard” words in English is always greatly overestimated.2 It is undoubtedly surprising to a child to learn that cough rhymes with off, but it is probably a good deal less disconcerting than adults may fancy, for everything new is surprising to a child, and one marvel is taken in as facilely as another. Even adult foreigners find the standard spelling less baffling than is sometimes alleged, as more than one witness experienced in teaching them English has testified.3 It is not infrequently argued that the inconsistencies of English are unknown to their native languages, but this is moonshine. No civilized language is really spelled phonetically, not even German, Spanish or Italian. German is actually full of sounds that are represented in its orthography by different characters, e.g., ch and g, f and ph, c and k, and letters that have different sounds in different situations, e.g., the ch of loch and licht, the s in essen and hase, the r in rad and mutter. So long ago as 1876 the Prussian minister of education, Adalbert Falk (1827–1900), one of the chief figures in the Kulturkampf, called a conference of philologists, pedagogues, publishers and printers to give the archaic German spelling of the time an overhauling, and in 1880 his successor, R. V. von Puttkamer (1828–1900), ordered the adoption of some of the changes this committee recommended, e.g., the omission of the silent h after consonants. But the changes thus effected did not satisfy the more radical spelling reformers, who pointed out, inter alia, that there were still six signs for the sound of k, to wit, k, c, ck, ch, qu and g. These enthusiasts had formed a General Association for Simplified Spelling (Allgemeiner Verein für Vereinfachte Rechtschreibung) in 1876, and after 1877 it published a monthly journal, Reform. Unhappily, their scheme advocated the introduction of new characters for ch, sch and ng, and in consequence it met with so much opposition that it gradually faded out, despite the fact that the famous pathologist and politician, Rudolf Virchow (1821–1900), was in favor of it, and the further fact that the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, in 1890, ordered the ministry of education to “take the matter into consideration.”1
Spanish and Italian come much closer to phonetic spelling than German, but their orthography is made difficult by the dialectal variations that are so plentiful in both. Says Hugh Morrison:
In Latin-American Spanish ll and y are pronounced alike, and z and c before i and e are pronounced like s. B and v are universally pronounced alike, and h is always silent except in ch.… The Mexicans have the best pronunciation of all Spanish-speaking peoples,… [but] ask an average Mexican to write vayas, a form of the verb to go, and he will spell it in any one of eight different ways: vayas, vallas, vayaz, vallaz, bayas, ballas, bayaz and ballaz.… Can you imagine anyone misspelling the pronoun l, or any word as common as that in any language in the world?… [In Spanish] the word is yo, and I have seen [Mexicans] write it llo hundreds of times.1
Of Italian Morrison says:
Italians in New York … assured me that Italian phonetics were foolproof, unlike Spanish, as b and v were pronounced as in English, there was no y at all, z was pronounced like ts, and c like ch, so neither one could possibly be confused with s. The h, they said, occurred only in the ch and gh combinations, which were phonetically watertight, and in four forms of the auxiliary verb to have, and these latter forms, ho, hai, ha and hanno, were all I really had to remember.… [But] I soon found out that standard Italian is a dialect of just one part of Italy, Tuscany, and that words are spelled as the
y are pronounced in that one province only. So, to a Neapolitan or a Sicilian, or, in fact, to nine-tenths of the people of Italy, the simplicity of the spelling system is a total loss.… Just as Mexicans misspell words as common as l, so Italians misspell words as common as you.… There are several second person pronouns, including tu, ti, te, voi and vi, and I have seen them spelled du, di, de, foi and fi many times.
Russian spelling, which had been static since it was fixed in the Eighteenth Century by M. V. Lomonosov (1711–65), the grammarian, was reformed by fiat by the Kremlin in 1924. The number of letters in the alphabet was reduced from thirty-seven to thirty-two, the crossing of the t and the dotting of the i were abolished, and various other simplifications were effected. But a proposal to abandon the Cyrillic alphabet for the Roman was rejected. In Bulgaria, in 1923, when the dictator, Alexander Stambolsky, undertook to anticipate the Kremlin’s reforms, his Bulgarian lieges would have none of them, and the literate among them joined the Army in a revolt which led to his butchery on June 9.2 In Turkey, a few years later, Kemal Pasha had better luck, for the Army was under his thumb and at least nine out of ten Turks were illiterate. He was therefore successful in substituting the Roman alphabet of Europe for the clumsy and difficult Arabic alphabet, and in bringing in what almost amounted to phonetic spelling.3 In France the learned men of the Academy began considering spelling reform in 1893, and after six months of hard sweating decided to confine the silent e, as much as possible, to the feminine forms of nouns, and to substitute f for ph, also wherever possible. It turned out to be impossible in most cases, and by 1905 a savant named Paul Moyer was beating a tub for a new reform movement with teeth in it. Nothing came of it, and to this day French spelling is even less phonetic than English.1
In their effort to point up the inconsistencies and other absurdities of the latter, spelling reformers have frequently resorted to a kind of reductio ad absurdum. That is to say, they have undertaken to show how bad it would be if it were really as bad as, in their more soaring moments, they say it is now. Sometimes they concoct rhymes showing the unlikeness in current spelling of words that rhyme, and sometimes they carry the thing a step further by respelling words in what that spelling would come to if it were consistent in its worst inconsistencies. Everyone is familiar with such limericks as:
There was a young girl in the choir
Whose voice rose up hoir and hoir
Till it reached such a height
It was clear out of seight
And they found it next day in the spoir.2
And such pedagogical rhymes as this:
Write we know is written right,
When we see it written write;
But when we see it written wright,
We know ’tis not then written right;
For write, to have it written right,
Must not be written right nor wright,
Nor yet should it be written rite,
But write — for so ’tis written right.3
The other device produces such monstrosities as foolish spelled pphoughtluipsh – the f as in sapphire, the oo as in through, the l as in hustle, the i as in build and the sh as in pshaw;4 fish as ghotti — the f as in rough, the i as in women, and the sh as in nation;1 potatoes as ghoughphtheightteeaux – gh as in hiccough,2 ou as in dough, phth as in phthisic,3 eigh as in neigh, tte as in gazette, and eaux as in beaux;4 scissors as psozzyrrzz – ps as in psalm, o as in women, zz as in buzz, yrr as in myrrh,5 and z as in whizz —;6 root as lueed – l as in colonel, ue as in rue, and ed as in liked —; corn as kougholpn – k as in book, ough as in though, ol as in colonel and pn as in pneumonia —; and wish as juoti – ju as in Juanita, o as in women, and ti as in nation.7 The same words often appear in many of these somewhat feeble inventions, e.g., colonel, nation, pshaw, pneumonia, rough, dough, women and through. Sometimes they deal with proper names, as when Turner becomes Phtholognyrrh – phth as in phthisic, olo as in colonel, gn as in gnat and yrrh as in myrrh.8 One of the earliest is to be found in Alexander J. Ellis’s century-old “Plea for Phonetic Spelling,”9 where it is ascribed to William Gregory, professor of chemistry at Edinburgh. It takes the form of a letter to Isaac Pitman, then editor of the Phonotypic Journal, and runs in part as follows:
Eye obzerve yew proepeaux two introwduice ay nue sissedem ov righting, bigh whitch ue eckspres oanly theigh sowneds anned knot thee orthoggerafey oph they wurds; butt Igh phthink ugh gow to fare inn cheighnjing owr thymeonird alfahbeat, aned ading sew menny neau lebtors.10
All the American spelling reformers, beginning with Noah Webster, have made the capital mistake of trying to cover too much ground at one operation. A very impressive number of Webster’s innovations were accepted and are still the preferred American spellings, but many, many more were rejected.1 The Simplified Spelling Board and its associated soothsayers suffered the same failure, and on a larger scale. When the National Education Association brought out its first list of proposed new spellings in 1898, to wit, tho, altho, thru, thruout, thoro, thoroly, thorofare, program, prolog, catalog, pedagog and decalog, they were met with considerable politeness, and some of them are in wide use today, but when the Simplified Spelling Board, intoxicated by Carnegie’s money, began making the list longer and longer and wilder and wilder, until by 1919 it included such items as eg, hed, bild, tipe, laf and leag,2 the national midriff began to tickle and tremble, and soon the whole movement was reduced to comedy. Of it Arthur G. Kennedy has said:
Enthusiasm outran discretion, too many changes were urged in too short a time, and the movement soon lost momentum and lapsed into a state of indecision and discouragement. The discouragement was due, not so much to the opposition of “the ignorant and stubborn educated” against whom [Thomas R.] Lounsbury railed as to the great difficulties that would naturally be experienced by publishers, stenographers, teachers and all writers and users of the present well intrenched system of spelling. When the activities of the Simplified Spelling Board culminated in a Handbook of Simplified Spelling in 1920, the list of reformed spellings offered had become so formidable that one glance at the thousands of simplifications was sufficient to discourage most students of the English language.3
Sir William Craigie, one of the editors of the NED and chief editor of the DAE, made the same point in a wise paper printed in 1944:
There would be better prospect of some success if the aim were less ambitious. Gradual changes in certain words or types of words, such as have been made in the past, might well be introduced by writers and printers, which in time would become so familiar that the older forms would take their place with those already discarded, as horrour and terrour, musick and physick, deposi’e and fossile, chymical and chymist. Such changes, however, could only be of a limited character, and would still leave the essentials of English spelling intact. When all is said against it that can be said, it is well to bear in mind that it has now stood the test of three centuries, and in spite of all its alleged defects has not prevented English from attaining the world-wide position it now holds.1
In another paper Craigie called attention to an impediment that nearly all spelling reformers have passed over too casually:
The question of the possibility or advantage of change becomes more difficult when the normalized spelling would reduce to a common form those homophones which at present are differentiated and on that account are immediately recognizable.2 If the postal mail were respelled as male, the meaning of male carriers might well be in doubt in certain contexts, and if sew became sow it would not only eliminate a useful distinction but would add a third homograph to the noun sow.3 This problem, of course, applies to all homophones with distinctive spellings, whether these have etymological justification or not. They form indeed one of the features of the English vocabulary which have to be taken seriously into account before it can be decided whether the present orthography can be usefully modified or replaced by one on a more phonetic basis.4
Craigie concludes that phonetic spelling is not necessarily
possible to all languages. “Irish and Scottish Gaelic,” he says, “are as far from being phonetically written as they could well be, but any one familiar with either form of the language knows how unintelligible they can become when any attempt is made to replace the conventional historic orthography by one which aims at representing the actual sounds.” He also cites the case of Faeröese, an archaic Scandinavian dialect spoken on the desolate Faeroe Islands, 200 miles north of the Shetlands. When this language was first reduced to writing, toward the close of the Eighteenth Century, use was made of “an orthography which as far as possible represented the actual pronunciation,” but it produced such uncouth effects that, after an experience of half a century, it was “replaced by a spelling closely based upon Icelandic.” “That a phonetic spelling,” says Craigie, “should in this way have been abandoned in favor of a historic after a fair trial is evidence that the value of the one or the other may depend upon the nature of the language to which they are applied.”5
Craigie hints that English is one of the languages which resist the phonetizing process, and for two reasons. The first is that it is made up of words coming from widely different sources – “the native, Romanic, classical and exotic” —, and each element has brought in its own traditions in spelling. If, in a proposed spelling reform scheme,
the native standard is adopted, much of the Romanic and classical element becomes unrecognizable, e.g., if seed is taken as the natural representation of the sounds s, ee, d, then cede and recede must become seed and reseed. If mesh is normal, then both cession and session must become seshon, and fissure will fall together with fisher.1 On the other hand if the Romanic and classical fuse or muse is taken as a model, then news will be nuse, and huse would represent both hues and the third person singular of the verb hew.2
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