FOR THE REFORM OF ENGLISH SPELLING.
Many Representative Men Associated
With the New Movement to
Simplify Orthography.
Andrew Carnegie's latest activity is to champion a movement for the reform of English spelling. He has promised to finance a campaign by the Simplified Spelling Board. The greater part of the actual campaign work will be done by the following executive committee of the board: Professor Brander Matthews, chairman; Dr. Charles P.G. Scott, secretary; Dr. William Hayes Ward, Henry Holt, Dr. I.K. Funk, and Colonel H.B. Sprague. With Mr. Carnegie's backing, far-reaching results are likely to be gained.
Movements for reformed spelling are no new thing, but this is the first one that has been adequately financed.
Word comes from England that the poet Swinburne denounces the Carnegie plan as "a monstrous, barbarous absurdity." But the American press, on the whole, seems favorable. For example, the New York Times says:
The number of people who are vehemently in love with the difficulties, absurdities, inconsistencies—and crystallized ignorances—of our present spelling is very small, and neither their denunciation nor their ridicule will weigh at all heavily upon the great majority, who look upon spelling as a means to an end, and to an end quite different from the preservation of etymological history in the most clumsy, expensive, and deceptive of forms.
One might imagine, from the way in which the enemies of this reform run on, that any changes made now would be the first to which English spelling had ever been subjected—would be the establishment of an evil precedent instead of merely a slight hastening, in the interest of convenience and economy, of a process that has been going on steadily ever since the day when English became a written language.
One of our correspondents said yesterday that, in his opinion, "before we try to monkey further with so good an instrument as the English language we ought to try to use it properly."
Well, not necessarily. With a little, or even with a lot, of "monkeying" an amount of time almost incalculably large, now devoted to the learning of such utterly useless and imbecile things as the arrangement of the vowels in "siege" and "seize," could be used on the task which our correspondent wisely intimated is so important.
The personality of the Simplified Spelling Board is guarantee that the demand for an improved orthography is not an outgrowth of ignorance or irreverence. These men have more than a little affection for the history of words, and they are not at all likely to do anything that will hide or distort it. They will, however, put and keep that history in its proper place.