Simplified Spelling
The invitation in the January number for views on Simplified Spelling has brought some interesting letters from both sides. The best objections that we have seen anywhere are the following:
(1) From an eminent professor:
... This point, briefly, is whether the spoken language is the only entity, so to say, to be considered in the case, and the written language merely an effort to represent it, or whether the written language is equally a reality for the purposes of civilization....
I have just received a holiday greeting ... reading
Harty Crismas Greetings.
The chain of frendship reaching far
Links days that wer with days that ar.For him [the sender] all written characters are absolutely nothing but the effort to express spoken sounds, and he puts anything on paper which he thinks will represent the sound he wants most immediately for the reader's intelligence. If he is right, if our written language is nothing but this, there should be no delay in altering it radically.
But is my philological friend right? I think certainly not. Since printing came to take a really large place in civilization, the written word has been a logos—a direct means of representing thought—quite as truly as the spoken. As an agency for communicating thought between absent persons, for preserving thought from one time to another, and even for communicating the knowledge of a foreign tongue to a contemporary learner, the written word actually exceeds the spoken in general importance. And to a very large extent it does this not by representing the sounds of the spoken word, but by representing the idea through an independent convention. When I read the word "choir" I do not think first that it represents the syllable kwiir, and then that the syllable kwiir means a company of singers. Some foreigners who have learned English orally doubtless do go through this process; but those who have learned it primarily by reading, or for reading, do not....
The participle finished has a certain real existence as a language fact, undisturbed by the accident that it is now pronounced finisht.
And this great entity, the written English language, the chief medium of scholarship, literature, history, law, and even business ... is what it is proposed to change. Perhaps it should be done; perhaps the times demand an heroic sacrifice of the organ of scholarly and literary communication and tradition, in the interest of increased efficiency on the part of the average man for whom the language of scholarship and literature is negligible. But we should not mistake the meaning of the effort. It is not the mere effort to do better what we are doing already—writing words so-and-so because they sound so-and-so; for we are already doing nothing of the kind. It is the effort to transfer English from the group where, with modern French and other tongues, it now belongs,—the group of languages whose history has differentiated a written and a spoken form,—to the group represented by classic Latin and modern Italian, whose (doubtless happier) history has kept the written form a fairly accurate replica of the spoken....
The impression often prevails that those who hesitate to commit themselves to the enticements of the Spelling Board do so merely because the new spellings "look so queer." Of course this very statement is a clumsy and unpenetrating way of expressing the fact that the whole language psychology of a reading generation is disturbed by the efforts in question.
(II) From a lady:
This unspeakable spelling is history-destroying, tradition-annihilating, and puts the veriest hind on a semblance of equality with a person of elegance.
As Nietsche says: "Let us be free from moralic acid"!!
Possibly to some tastes, a neck without a goitre would be more "elegant" than a neck with one—or tho than though.
(III) From a well-known author:
The tendency of our English speech is constantly to "reform" its Orthography! Witness the betterment between the spelling of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare, and between that of Shakespeare and that of the days of Queen Anne! Well then, granting it to be the irresistible tendency of our Orthography to better itself, why not permit it to go on in peace bettering itself? Why assist Fate? Are our awful Spelling Reformers, like the impatient young gentleman in Mr. Stockton's story, appointed to the task of Assisting Fate?
(IV) From a talented author and critic—a lady: