But why should orthography be made subservient to etymology? What have the two things in common? They exist for wholly different ends, to be attained by wholly different means. To bend either from its own work to the aid of the other is to impair the utility of both. This truth is recognized by all etymologists, and by all students of language, altho it has not yet found acceptance among men of letters, who are rarely students of language in the scientific sense. “It may be observed,” Mr. Sweet declares, “that it is mainly among the class of half-taught dabblers in philology that etymological spelling has found its supporters”; and he goes on to say that “all true philologists and philological bodies have uniformly denounced it as a monstrous absurdity both from a practical and a scientific point of view.” I should never dare to apply to the late Archbishop Trench and the London journalists who echo his errors so harsh a phrase as Mr. Sweet’s “half-taught dabblers in philology”; but when a fellow-Briton uses it perhaps I may venture to quote it without reproach.
As I have said before, the alleged “American spelling” differs but very slightly from that which prevails in England. A wandering New-Yorker who rambles through London is able to collect now and again evidences of orthographic survivals which give him a sudden sense of being in an older country than his own. I have seen a man whose home was near Gramercy Park stop short in the middle of a little street in Mayfair, and point with ecstatic delight to the strip of paper across the glass door of a bar proclaiming that CYDER was sold within. I have seen the same man thrill with pure joy before the shop of a chymist in the window of which corn-plaisters were offered for sale. He wondered why a British house should have storeys when an American house has stories; and he disliked intensely the wanton e wherewith British printers have recently disfigured form, which in the latest London typographical vocabularies appears as forme. This e in form is a gratuitous addition, and therefore contrary to the trend of orthographic progress, which aims at the suppression of all arbitrary and needless letters.
The so-called “American spelling” differs from the spelling which obtains in England only in so far as it has yielded a little more readily to the forces which make for progress, for uniformity, for logic, for common sense. But just how fortuitous and chaotic the condition of English spelling is nowadays both in Great Britain and in the United States no man knows who has not taken the trouble to investigate for himself. In England, the reactionary orthography of Samuel Johnson is no longer accepted by all. In America, the revolutionary orthography of Noah Webster has been receded from even by his own inheritors. There is no standard, no authority, not even that of a powerful, resolute, and domineering personality.
Perhaps the attitude of philologists toward the present spelling of the English language, and their opinion of those who are up in arms in defense of it, have never been more tersely stated than in Professor Lounsbury’s most admirable ‘Studies in Chaucer,’ a work which I should term eminently scholarly, if that phrase did not perhaps give a false impression of a book wherein the results of learning are set forth with the most adroit literary art, and with an uninsistent but omnipresent humor, which is a constant delight to the reader:
“There is certainly nothing more contemptible than our present spelling, unless it be the reasons usually given for clinging to it. The divorce which has unfortunately almost always existed between English letters and English scholarship makes nowhere a more pointed exhibition of itself than in the comments which men of real literary ability make upon proposals to change or modify the cast-iron framework in which our words are now clothed. On one side there is an absolute agreement of view on the part of those who are authorized by their knowledge of the subject to pronounce an opinion. These are well aware that the present orthography hides the history of the word instead of revealing it; that it is a stumbling-block in the way of derivation or of pronunciation instead of a guide to it; that it is not in any sense a growth or development, but a mechanical malformation, which owes its existence to the ignorance of early printers and the necessity of consulting the convenience of printing-offices. This consensus of scholars makes the slightest possible impression upon men of letters throughout the whole great Anglo-Saxon community. There is hardly one of them who is not calmly confident of the superiority of his opinion to that of the most famous special students who have spent years in examining the subject. There is hardly one of them who does not fancy he is manifesting a noble conservatism by holding fast to some spelling peculiarly absurd, and thereby maintaining a bulwark against the ruin of the tongue. There is hardly one of them who has any hesitation in discussing the question in its entirety, while every word he utters shows that he does not understand even its elementary principles. There would be something thoroughly comic in turning into a fierce international dispute the question of spelling honor without the u, were it not for the depression which every student of the language cannot well help feeling in contemplating the hopeless abysmal ignorance of the history of the tongue which any educated man must first possess in order to become excited over the subject at all.” (‘Studies in Chaucer,’ vol. iii., pp. 265-267.)
Pronunciation is slowly but steadily changing. Sometimes it is going further and further away from the orthography; for example, either and neither are getting more and more to have in their first syllable the long i sound instead of the long e sound which they had once. Sometimes it is being modified to agree with the orthography; for example, the older pronunciations of again to rime with men, and of been to rime with pin, in which I was carefully trained as a boy, seem to me to be giving way before a pronunciation in exact accord with the spelling, again to rime with pain, and been to rime with seen. These two illustrations are from the necessarily circumscribed experience of a single observer, and the observation of others may not bear me out in my opinion; but tho the illustrations fall to the ground, the main assertion, that pronunciation is changing, is indisputable.
No doubt the change is less rapid than it was before the invention of printing; far less rapid than it was before the days of the public school and of the morning newspaper. There are variations of pronunciation in different parts of the United States and of Great Britain, as there are variations of vocabulary; but in the future there will be a constantly increasing tendency for these variations to disappear. There are irresistible forces making for uniformity—forces which are crushing out Platt-Deutsch in Germany, Provençal in France, Romansch in Switzerland. There is a desire to see a standard set up to which all may strive to conform. In France a standard of pronunciation is found at the Comédie Française; and in Germany, what is almost a standard of vocabulary has been set in what is now known as Bühnen-Deutsch.
In France the Academy was constituted chiefly to be a guardian of the language; and the Academy, properly conservative as it needs must be, is engaged in a slow reform of French orthography, yielding to the popular demand decorously and judiciously. By official action, also, the orthography of German has been simplified and made more logical and brought into closer relation with modern pronunciation. Even more thorough reforms have been carried through in Italy, in Spain, and in Holland. Yet neither French nor German, not Italian, Spanish, or Dutch, stood half as much in need of the broom of reform as English, for in no one of these languages were there so many dark corners which needed cleaning out; in no one of them the difference between orthography and pronunciation so wide; and in no one of them was the accepted spelling debased by numberless false etymologies.
Beyond all question, what is needed on both sides of the Atlantic, in the United States as well as in Great Britain, is a conviction that the existing orthography of English is not sacred, and that to tamper with it is not high treason. What is needed is the consciousness that neither Samuel Johnson nor Noah Webster compiled his dictionary under direct inspiration. What is needed is an awakening to the fact that our spelling, so far from being immaculate at its best, is, at its best, hardly less absurd than the haphazard, rule-of-thumb, funnily phonetic spelling of Artemus Ward and of Josh Billings. What is needed is anything which will break up the lethargy of satisfaction with the accepted orthography, and help to open the eyes of readers and writers to the stupidity of the present system and tend to make them discontented with it.
(1892)