To diffuse accurate information about the history of English orthography is the most pressing and immediate duty now before those of us who wish to see our spelling simplified. We must keep reminding those we wish to convince that we want their aid in helping along the movement which has in the past changed musique to music, riband to ribbon, phantasy to fantasy, æra to era, phænomenon to phenomenon, and which in the present is changing catalogue to catalog, æsthetic to esthetic, programme to program, technique to technic.
There never has been any “regular” spelling accepted by everybody, or any system of orthography sustained by universal convention. To assume that there is anything of the sort is adroitly to beg the very question at issue. There are always in English many words the spelling of which is not finally fixed; and these doubtful orthographies Professor Peck, for example, would decide in one way and Professor Skeat would decide in another. The most of Professor Peck’s decisions would result in conforming his spelling to that which obtains in the printing-office of the London Times, but in several cases he would exercise the right of private judgment, spelling pædagogue, for example, and Vergil. But if he chooses to exercise the right of private judgment, he is estopped from denying this right also to Professor Skeat; and the moment either of them sets up the personal equation as a guide, all pretense of an accepted system vanishes.
It is our duty also to draw attention to the fact that it is a wholesome thing that there is no accepted system and that the orthography of our language should be free to modify itself in the future as it has in the past. It is this absence of system which gives fluidity and flexibility and the faculty of adaptation to changing conditions. The Chief Justice of England, when he addressed the American Bar Association, recorded his protest against a cast-iron code in law as tending to hinder legal development; and our language, like our law, must beware lest it lose its power of conforming to the needs of our people as these may be unexpectedly developed. Just as the conservatism of the English-speaking stock makes it highly improbable that any sweeping change in our spelling will ever be made, so the enterprise of the English-speaking stock, its energy and its common sense, make it highly improbable that any system will long endure which cramps and confines and prevents progress and simplification.
Finally, we must all of us bend our energies to combating the notion that, as Mr. Smith has put it, “the existing printed form is not only a symbol but the most fitting symbol of our mother-tongue.” There is an almost superstitious veneration felt by most of us for the spellings we learnt at school; they seem to us sanctified by antiquity; and perhaps even an inquiry into the history of the language is not always enough to disestablish this reverence for false gods. Yet knowledge helps to free us from servitude to idols; and when we are told that the so-called “accepted spelling” has “dignity,” we may ask ourselves what dignity there can be in the spelling of harbour with an inserted u which is not pronounced, which has been thrust in comparatively recently, and which is etymologically misleading.
In his effective answer to Mr. Herbert Spencer’s argument against the metric system, President T. C. Mendenhall remarked that “ignorant prejudice” is not so dangerous an obstacle to human progress, nor as common, as what may be called “intelligent prejudice,” meaning thereby “an obstinate conservatism which makes people cling to what is or has been, merely because it is or has been, not being willing to take the trouble to do better, because already doing well, all the while knowing that doing better is not only the easier, but is more in harmony with existing conditions. Such conservatism is highly developed among English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic.” It is just such conservatism as this that those of us will have to overcome who wish to see our English orthography continue its lifelong efforts toward simplification.
To understand how unfortunate for the cause of progress it is when its leaders miscalculate the popular inertia and when they are therefore moved to demand more than seems reasonable to the people as a whole, we have only to consider the result of the joint action, in 1883, of the Philological Society of England and of the American Philological Association, in consequence of which certain rules were prepared to simplify our spelling. Here was a union of indisputable authorities in favor of an amended orthography; but unfortunately the changes suggested were both many and various. They were too various to please any but the most resolute radicals; and they were too many to be remembered readily by the great majority of every-day folk taking no particular interest in the subject. They included theater, honor, advertize, catalog; and had they not included anything else, or had they included only a very few similar simplifications, these spellings might have won acceptance in the past score of years, even in Great Britain; the same authorities would now be in a position to make a few further suggestions equally easy to remember, with a fair hope that these would establish themselves in turn.
Owing to this attempt to do too much all at once, the joint action of the two great philological organizations came to naught. Such effect as it had was indirect at best. It may have been the exciting cause of the so-called “Printers’ Rules,” which were approved and recommended by many of the leading typographers of the United States a few years later. These printers’ rules were few and obvious. They suggested catalog, program, epaulet, esthetic—all of which have become more familiar of late. They suggested further opposit, hypocrit, etc., and also fotograf, fonetic, etc.; and these simplifications have not yet been adopted widely enough to prevent the words thus emended from seeming a little strange to all those who had paid no special attention to the subject. And these uninterested outsiders are the very people who are to be converted. To them and to them only must all argument be addressed. We may rest assured that we have slight chance of bringing over to our side any of those who have actually enlisted against us. We must not count on desertions from the enemy; we must enroll the neutrals at every opportunity.
Probably the most important action yet taken in regard to our orthography was that of the National Educational Association in formally adopting for use in all its official publications twelve simplified spellings—program, tho, altho, thoro, thorofare, thru, thruout, catalog, prolog, decalog, demagog, pedagog. These simplified spellings were immediately adopted in the ‘Educational Review’ and in other periodicals edited by members of the association. They are very likely to appear with increasing frequency in the school-books which members may hereafter prepare; and any simplified spelling which once gets itself into a school-book is pretty sure to hold its own in the future. After an interval of ten or fifteen years the National Educational Association will be in a position to consider the situation again; and it may then decide that these twelve words have established themselves in their new form sufficiently widely and firmly to make it probable that the association could put forward another list of a dozen more simplified spellings with a reasonable certainty that those also will be accepted.
The United States government appointed a board to decide on a uniform orthography for geographical names; and the recommendations of this body were generally in the direction of increased simplicity—Bering Straits, for example. The spellings thus officially adopted by the national government were at once accepted by the chief publishers of school text-books. And these makers of school-books also follow the rules formulated by a committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science appointed to bring about uniformity in the spelling and pronunciation of chemical terms. Among the rules formulated by the committee and adopted by the association were two which dropped a terminal e from certain chemical terms entering into more general use. Thus the men of science now write oxid, iodid, chlorid, etc., and quinin, morphin, anilin, etc., altho the general public has not relinquished the earlier orthography, oxide and quinine. Even the word toxin, which came into being since the adoption of these rules by the associated scientists, is sometimes to be seen in newspapers as toxine.
Thus we see that there is progress all along the line; it may seem very slow, like that of a glacier, but it is as certain as it is irresistible. There is no call for any of us to be disheartened by the prospect. We may, indeed, each of us do what little we can severally toward hastening the result. We can form the habit of using in our daily writing such simplified spellings as will not seem affected or freakish, keeping ourselves always in the forefront of the movement, but never going very far in advance of the main body. We must not make a fad of orthographic amelioration, nor must we devote to it a disproportionate share of our activity—since we know that there are other reforms as pressing as this and even more important. But we can hold ourselves ready always to lend a hand to help along the cause; and we can show our willingness always to stand up and be counted in its favor.