[191] This lady overlooked the other side of the question; viz. that by a reform of the spelling, words now spelt alike and pronounced differently, would be distinguished by their letters; for the nouns abuse and use would be distinguished from the verbs, which would be spelt abuze, yuze; and so in many instances. See the answer below.
[192] This remark of the Doctor is very just and obvious. A countryman writes aker or akur for acre; yet the countryman is right, as the word ought to be spelt; and we laugh at him only because we are accustomed to be wrong.
[193] This is a fact of vast consequence.
[194] That is, if the language had retained the old Roman spelling, and been pronounced as the modern Italian. This is a fair state of facts, and a complete answer, to all objections to a reform of spelling.
[195] In the same ridiculous manner, as we write, rough, still, neighbor, wrong, tongue, true, rhetoric, &c. and yet pronounce the words, ruf, stil, nabur, rong, tung, tru, retoric.
Transcriber's Notes:
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical and spelling errors were corrected.
In DISSERTATION V the author was inconsistent in the use of italics in the minor headings—most of the time the language was italicized but when there were two or more languages then the language name was in standard font and the articles, conjunctions etc. were italicized. The usage was changed so that languages were always italicized and the other words were unitalicized.