ARE WE WORSHIPERS OF THE BIG DICTIONARY?
Professor Calvin Thomas Says We Revere
Usage Too Greatly—Old Dog Story
Bears Out the Facts of Charge.
The movement for simplified spelling has been attracting many men of mark in literature and the professions. Notions of the strict sanctity of fixed forms of spelling disappear in the light of the historical evidence which the reformers are presenting.
Thus, it is pointed out that from the beginning our spelling has been subject to changes so great that the young schoolboy of to-day cannot read Chaucer without a vocabulary, even with the obsolete words eliminated. Obsolete spellings are too much for him.
The Simplified Spelling Board has reprinted an address delivered before the Modern Language Association by Professor Calvin Thomas, of Columbia University. Describing the difficulty of teaching children our present spelling, he says:
How heavy is the burden, as a matter of sober fact? To this question it is difficult to give a strictly scientific answer, because there is no perfectly satisfactory way of attacking the problem. Literature teems with estimates and computations of the time and money wasted in one way and another because of our peculiar spelling; but from the nature of the case they can only be roughly approximate.
Speaking broadly, it appears that children receive more or less systematic instruction in spelling throughout the primary grades—that is, for eight years. If now we suppose that they pursue on the average five subjects simultaneously, and that spelling receives equal attention with the others, we get one year and three-fifths as the amount of solid school time devoted to this acquirement.
This, however, does not tell the whole story; for many begin the struggle before they enter school, many continue to need instruction in the high school, and even in college, and not a few walk through life with an orthographic lameness which causes them to suffer in comfort and reputation. Probably two years and a half would be nearer the mark as a gross estimate of the average time consumed in learning to spell more or less accurately.
We have now to ask: How much of this time is wasted? How much must we deduct for the reasonable requirements of the case? Zealous reformers often assume that it is practically all wasted. They tell us that if we had a proper system of spelling the acquisition of the art in childhood would take care of itself after a little elementary instruction. This may be so, but we have no means of proving positively that it is so.
If any people in the world had an ideal system of spelling, we might go to them and find out how long it takes their children to learn spelling. But there is no such people; and so we are forced back upon such rough and general statements—perfectly true in themselves—as that German and Italian children learn to spell much more easily and quickly than do our own children.
Meanwhile, it is hardly fair to take as one term of comparison an ideal condition which never existed and never will exist. An alphabet must always be a rough instrument of practical convenience. Very certainly our posterity will never adopt any thoroughgoing system of phonetic spelling.
Nothing is going to be changed per saltum. The most we can hope for is a gradual improvement, accelerated, perhaps, by wisely directed effort. This means that spelling will always have to be learned and taught, and that considerable time will have to be devoted to it.