We have mistakes belonging to Class A, for instance, when Englishmen use the ng combination in place of the French nasals, or when they diphthongize the French long, pure vowels, when they pronounce ʃ or k instead of German ch, or [z] or for German z [ts], [ə·], as in cur, instead of [œ·r] in French cœur, when they pronounce French dû like the English due, etc.
Mistakes belonging to Class B arise if you pronounce French gent like gant, peut like put, or vice versâ eut like [ø], German frass or fuss with a short, or nass or nuss with a long vowel, bischen with [ʃ], etc.
Both kinds of mistakes may occur in the same word, as when München is pronounced [minkən] or [mjuŋkən] instead of [mynçen].
The mistakes belonging to class A are not due to the orthography; those mistakes we can also make in languages whose spelling corresponds to the pronunciation; they are largely due to our native habits of articulation, and they are to be counteracted by means of the phonetical training which has been described above. If the foreign sounds have once been well learned in the introductory course, this kind of mistakes can only occur through carelessness or through the lack of continued practice.
Mistakes in the employment of the sounds (class B) however, are as a rule due to disagreement between the pronunciation and the orthography of each language; they are not caused by our native habits of articulation, and even those that have learned all the foreign sounds perfectly (indeed even the natives themselves) are liable to make them in every new word which they see written, but have never heard.
It is this last kind of mistake that phonetical transcription helps us to avoid, it protects us against the mistakes which the different national orthographies actually seduce us to make. Phonetical transcription is necessary in the teaching of all languages, but of course, it may deviate from the ordinary orthography in greater or less degree in the different languages. In Finnish and Spanish, the orthography is so nearly phonetical that only relatively few changes are necessary in order to indicate the pronunciation; in Italian, almost all that is needed is to indicate if e and o are open or closed, if s and z are voiced [z, dz] or voiceless [s, ts], and which single consonants are to be pronounced double (long). In German, the orthography is already much more capricious, but in languages like French, Danish, and English, the number of conflicting rules with all their exceptions is so great that the phonetical transcription necessarily has quite a different appearance from the traditional spelling.
Max Müller once said that the English orthography is a national misfortune, and Viëtor has improved upon this observation by declaring that it is an international misfortune, since it is not only Englishmen but also all educated persons in other lands who have to be bothered with it. Now, by means of phonetical transcription the words of the foreign language are presented to us in a kind of normal or ideal orthography, where every letter always signifies the same sound, and every sound is always indicated in the same manner.
Some persons urge the objection against the use of phonetical transcription that it can never be made so perfect that it can show all the shades of intonation, etc., in the spoken language, so that it cannot take the place of a teacher’s oral instruction. But we have never maintained that it could; aside from private study without a teacher, which must needs always be more or less imperfect, we have always emphasized the exceedingly great importance of the teacher pronouncing the words for the pupils, and we have not recommended phonetical transcription as something to replace, but as something to support, the teacher’s oral instruction in pronunciation. Even if it misses some of the very finest shades, it may still be of benefit, just as a table of logarithms can be very useful even if the numbers are not carried out farther than to the fourth decimal place.
Other opponents again have exactly the reverse objection to make, that our system of sound-symbols is too delicately detailed for school use. Even if many people only say this because they confuse the phonetical transcription which is used in scientific works with the far simpler transcription which we want to introduce for school use, and which is by no means beyond the powers of comprehension of an ordinary pupil, still we have an answer right at hand. We are aiming at (and attaining) greater exactness than our predecessors cared for, but this is very necessary too, for the old school pronunciation was too unintelligible to the native. Besides, our system is constructed on such simple principles, that we attain to a higher degree of exactness with less trouble than you do with far more difficult means. When mathematicians began to designate the value of π in decimal form (3·1416) instead of the fractional form 22/7, they not only attained greater exactness but also greater ease in using the quantity in long calculations, since the decimal is easier to handle than the fraction. Our phonetical transcription may pride itself on exactly corresponding advantages.
It has already been tried in many old readers (to say nothing of the dictionaries) to counteract the injurious influence of the orthography on the pronunciation by means of different systems of designating the pronunciation, such as numbers over the vowels, strokes denoting length and curves denoting shortness, italicizing of the s’s which ought to be voiced, or in other places italicizing of the silent letters, dots and flourishes above and under the letters. All such systems, just because they try to deviate as little as possible from the orthography, necessarily adopt a number of its caprices and thus become too complicated to be of any real benefit to the pupils. But the phoneticians, by starting out from rational principles, have succeeded in creating systems of phonetical transcription which really meet all reasonable demands in the way of exactness and simplicity.[49] That they really are simple and easy to learn has been proved to me more than once in striking ways; in several schools where my books are used but where the teacher has been afraid of the phonetical transcription, the children have resorted to it of their own accord, when they came to a word that they did not know how to pronounce; several parents have also told me that they have familiarized themselves with the phonetical transcription in the books which their children used and they did not find it at all difficult.