English Past and Present

by Richard Chenevix Trench

Pronouncing Dictionaries

And another reason which would make it quite as necessary then to learn orthography as now, is the following. Pronunciation, as I have already noticed, is far too fine and subtle a thing to be more than approximated to, and indicated in the written letter. In a multitude of cases the difficulties which pronunciation presented would be sought to be overcome in different ways, and thus different spelling, would arise; or if not so, one would have to be arbitrarily selected, and would have need to be learned, just as much as the spelling of a word now has need to be learned. I will only ask you, in proof of this which I affirm, to turn to any Pronouncing Dictionary. That greatest of all absurdities, a Pronouncing Dictionary, may be of some service to you in this matter; it will certainly be of none in any other. When you mark the elaborate and yet ineffectual artifices by which it toils after the finer distinctions of articulation, seeks to reproduce in letters what exists, and can only exist, as the spoken tradition of pronunciation, acquired from lip to lip by the organ of the ear, capable of being learned, but incapable of being taught; or when you compare two of these dictionaries with one another, and mark the entirely different schemes and combinations of letters which they employ for representing the same sound to the eye; you will then perceive how idle the attempt to make the written in language commensurate with the sounded; you will own that not merely out of human caprice, ignorance, or indolence, the former falls short of and differs from the later; but that this lies in the necessity of things, in the fact that man’s voice can effect so much more than ever his letter can[232]. You will then perceive that there would be as much, or nearly as much, of the arbitrary in spelling which calls itself phonetic as in our present, that spelling would have to be learned just as really then as now. We should be unable to dismiss the spelling card even after the arrival of that great day, when, for example, those lines of Pope which hitherto we have thus spelt and read,

“But errs not nature from this gracious end,
From burning suns when livid deaths descend,
When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep
Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep”?

when I say, instead of this they should present themselves to our eyes in the following attractive form:

“But ¿ erz not nɛtiur from ðis grɛcus end,
from burniŋ sunz when livid deθs dɨsend,
when erθkwɛks swolɵ, or when tempests swɨp
tounz tu wun grɛv, hɵl nɛconz tu ðe dɨp”.

[Transcriber’s note regarding phonetic symbols]

Losses of Phonetic Spelling

The scheme would not then fulfil its promises. Its vaunted gains, when we come to look closely at them, disappear. And now for its losses. There are in every language a vast number of words, which the ear does not distinguish from one another, but which are at once distinguishable to the eye by the spelling. I will only instance a few which are the same parts of speech; thus ‘sun’ and ‘son’; ‘virge’ (‘virga’, now obsolete) and ‘verge’; ‘reign’, ‘rain’, and ‘rein’; ‘hair’ and ‘hare’; ‘plate’ and ‘plait’; ‘moat’ and ‘mote’; ‘pear’ and ‘pair’; ‘pain’ and ‘pane’; ‘raise’ and ‘raze’; ‘air’ and ‘heir’; ‘ark’ and ‘arc’; ‘mite’ and ‘might’; ‘pour’ and ‘pore’; ‘veil’ and ‘vale’; ‘knight’ and ‘night’; ‘knave’ and ‘nave’; ‘pier’ and ‘peer’; ‘rite’ and ‘right’; ‘site’ and ‘sight’; ‘aisle’ and ‘isle’; ‘concent’ and ‘consent’; ‘signet’ and ‘cygnet’. Now, of course, it is a real disadvantage, and may be the cause of serious confusion, that there should be words in spoken languages of entirely different origin and meaning which yet cannot in sound be differenced from one another. The phonographers simply propose to extend this disadvantage already cleaving to our spoken languages, to the written languages as well. It is fault enough in the French language, that ‘mère’ a mother, ‘mer’ the sea, ‘maire’ a mayor of a town, should have no perceptible difference between them in the spoken tongue; or again that in some there should be nothing to distinguish ‘sans’, ‘sang’, ‘sent’, ‘sens’, ‘s’en’, ‘cent’; nor yet between ‘ver’, ‘vert’, ‘verre’ and ‘vers’. Surely it is not very wise to propose gratuitously to extend the same fault to the written languages as well.

This loss in so many instances of the power to discriminate between words, which however liable to confusion now in our spoken language, are liable to none in our written, would be serious enough; but far more serious than this would be the loss which would constantly ensue, of all which visibly connects a word with the past, which tells its history, and indicates the quarter from which it has been derived. In how many English words a letter silent to the ear, is yet most eloquent to the eye—the g for instance in ‘deign’, ‘feign’, ‘reign’, ‘impugn’, telling as it does of ‘dignor’, ‘fingo’, ‘regno’, ‘impugno’; even as the b in ‘debt’, ‘doubt’, is not idle, but tells of ‘debitum’ and ‘dubium’[233].

Pronunciation Alters