Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language Supplement 2 (62 page)
The trustees were then confronted with the question, Who should get the money? Should it all go to the Simplified Spelling Society, or should it be divided between the Society and some other organization or organizations, say, the Simplified Spelling Board? The trustees, unable to decide, appealed to the courts for guidance, and on March 1, 1939, the case came before Mr. Justice Bennett in the High Court of Justice, Chancery Division. The judge asked for expert evidence, and it was provided by Dr. Daniel Jones, professor of phonetics at the University of London, and Isaac James Pitman (later M.P.), grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman (1813–1897), inventor of the system of shorthand bearing his name.
2
Jones testified that “the Simplified Spelling Board of America” had “ceased to exist,” and that the Simplified Spelling Society “was the only society of its kind in the world with which he was acquainted.”
Pitman swore that “he knew of no society with objects similar.” Mr. Justice Bennett thereupon decided that the simplified Spelling Society should get all the money, and the trustees turned over to it £ 18,200.
1
At once it began bringing out a long series of books and pamphlets in promotion of the cause, and it has been doing so ever since.
These publications show that the Society hopes to reform English spelling without bringing in any new characters, without putting accents on any of the existing letters (save the dieresis to separate successive vowels, as we use it now), and without departing from the more obvious phonetic values. It proposes to substitute
dh
for the
th
of
father
, but is willing to let
th
stand as it is in
thing
. It uses
zh
for the French
j
-sound, substitutes
k
for hard
c
in all cases, and uses
ur
wherever
er
or
ir
is now used in its place,
e.g., urmin
(ermine) and
thurd
(third).
2
Hard
g
remains, but soft
g
is displaced by
j
. The consonants
b, d, f, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y
and
z
are unchanged, and
ch
and
sh
are used as now. The present vowels retain their short sounds; their other sounds are indicated by simple devices. The long
a
of
father
becomes
aa
; the long
o
of
lower, oe
; the long
u
of
moon, uu;
the
a
of
made, ae
. The long
e
is always
ee
. The diphthongs are indicated substantially as now; the palatal glide by putting
e
after, not before, the
u
. The sound of
eye
becomes
ie. S
, whenever it is sounded as
z
, is written
z
. Silent letters are dropped. Useless doublings are reduced to single letters. What all this comes to is shown by the following:
We instinktivly shrink from eny chaenj in whot iz familyar; and whot kan be mor familyar dhan dhe form ov wurdz dhat we hav seen and riten mor tiemz dhan we kan posibly estimaet? We taek up a book printed in Amerika, and
honor
and
center
jar upon us every tiem we kum akros dhem; nae, eeven to see
forever
in plaes ov
for ever
atrackts our atenshon in an unplezant wae. But dheez ar isolaeted kaesez; think ov dhe meny wurdz dhat wood hav to be chaenjd if eny real impruuvment wer to rezult. At dhe furst glaans a pasej in eny reformd speling looks “kweer” and “ugly.” Dhis objekshon iz aulwaez dhe furst to be maed; it iz purfektly natuerel; it iz dhe hardest to remuuv. Indeed, its efekt iz not weekend until dhe nue speling iz noe longger nue, until it has been seen ofen enuf to be familyar.
3
.
Happily, the shock to Britons on encountering the American
honor
is evaded by going the whole hog to
onor, labor
is disguised
as
laebor
, and
color
becomes
kulor
, which seems somehow less obscene than
color
. In the same way
center
is toned down to
senter
and
meter
to
meeter
, but there is no way to get round the abhorrent
theater
. There are some logical but startling interchanges:
tyre
becomes
tier
, and
tier
becomes
teer
. The
tho
of the Simplified Spelling Board becomes
dhoe
and its
thru
becomes
thruu. To, too
and
two
are alike
tuu
. At first glance, the new system simply looks like “bad” spelling, but it must be said for it that even its most radical innovations, like those of “bad” spelling itself, are usually readily fathomed,
e.g., hedkworterz, kwintesens, proelonggaeshon, forkloesher, miselaenyus
and
aproksimaet
.
1
In England, as in the United States, there are many lone-wolf spelling reformers. The earliest recorded was a monk named Ormin, who lived and suffered at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century.
2
Many later English authors of the classical line made attempts to regulate and improve the spelling of their time, notably John Milton, who used
sovran
for
sovereign
,
3
glimse
for
glimpse, hight
for
height
, and
thir
for
their
.
4
Swift seems to have been against simplified spelling, as Samuel Johnson was, and in 1712 denounced the “foolish opinion, advanced of late years, that we ought to spell exactly
as we speak,”
1
but Southey somehow found authority in him for
tho’, thro’
and
altho’
.
2
As everyone knows, George Bernard Shaw, in his heyday as a reformer, maintained a department of reformed spelling in his vast and bizarre Utopia. But save for a few somewhat banal innovations,
e.g., havn’t, program, novelet
, and
Renascence
, most of which were not really innovations at all,
3
he stuck closely to standard English spelling in his own writing, and even indulged himself in a few archaisms,
e.g., to shew
.
4
In theory, however, he was always in favor of very radical changes, including the abolition of silent letters and the adoption of an entirely new alphabet. In a letter to the London
Times
in 1945
5
he disported himself with the word
bomb
. The redundant
b
, he argued, “is entirely senseless and wastes the writer’s time,” and suggests “an absurd mispronunciation of the word exactly as if the word
gun
were to be spelt
gung
.” He reported that he had made an experiment with
bom
, and found that he could write it twenty-four times in one minute, whereas he could write
bomb
but eighteen times. He proposed that the British government appoint a committee of economists and statisticians to deal with the matter, and closed by saying that “if the Phoenician alphabet were only turned upside down and enlarged by seventeen letters from the Greek alphabet it would soon pay for the war.” Some months later, in an interview with Hayden Church, he explained that this new alphabet should have “at least forty-two letters, capable of indicating every sound in our speech without using more than one letter for each sound.”
6
“The yearly cost of having to write my name with four letters instead of two,” he went on, “is astronomical. The
saving would repay the cost of the atomic bomb in a few months.” But this argument was quickly demolished by Simeon Strunsky and Dr. Charles E. Funk in the New York
Times
. “Assume,” said Strunsky, “that he saved himself 25 per cent. of time in writing. What percentage would it cost his readers whose eyes would pause constantly to puzzle out many strange spellings?”
1
Said Funk:
Shaw wants to build a spelling reform upon pronunciation. That would be disastrous. Whose pronunciation would be the criterion? He naïvely suggests, broadly, “British pronunciation.” As if all Britishers spoke any more alike than do all Americans! He cites
bomb
as his pet peeve. But, for the record, how does Shaw pronounce
bomb?
Many Britishers, especially the older generation, would phonetically spell it
bum
, according to the various British dictionaries on my shelves. That was the way the poet Southey pronounced it, but the poet Young called it
boom
, by analogy with
tomb
, while the earlier poet Matthew Prior called it
boam
, by analogy with
comb
.
2
Another of England’s fans for simplified spelling is William Barkley, one of Lord Beaverbrook’s chief aides on the London
Daily Express
. His interest in the holy cause was first aroused by the late R. E. Zachrisson’s Anglic scheme in the early 30s,
3
but he now seems to favor the rather simpler and more logical plan of the Simplified Spelling Society, though with some changes of his own. For one thing, he rejects the use of
dh
for the sound of
th
in
that
, and sticks to
th
in both words of the
that
-class and those of the
think
-class. Again, he rejects the Society’s doubling of intervocalic
r
, as in
authorrity
. But in general he goes along, even when it comes to substituting
k
for
c
– for long a sign and symbol of extreme unenlightenment
in English folklore, as in American. “There is,” he admits, “a prejudice against
k
. Many people
think it is Teutonic. How much there is in habit can be seen at once in the spelling of the town of
Kanterbury
. How harsh and Teutonic! Yet this is the same word as
Kent
, and what is more purely and sweetly English than
Kent?
I fought against
k
for a time, thinking we could retain the
c
in many words.… [But]
k
is magnificently clean and clear in print. It takes three times as long to write it in longhand as
c
, more’s the pity, but it will replace many conglomerations of
ch, cq
and
ck
. The addition of
k
to
c
in many words must have arisen because the printers felt
c
was not clear enough by itself. The dropping of
k
in such words as
publick
is one of the few spelling changes in the last two centuries, fought to the last ditch by Boswell.
1
We will restore his
k
but drop his
c: publik
.
2
The spelling reform movement in both the United States and England, in its early days, had the support of many of the most eminent philologists then in practise in the two countries, and also of many distinguished literati, but it has never made any progress, and there is little evidence that it will do better in the foreseeable future. In this country it has been handicapped by the fact that, to Americans, phonetic spelling always suggests the grotesqueries of the comic writers stretching from Seba Smith
3
to Milt Gross, and by the further fact that popular interest in and respect for spelling prowess, fostered for more than a century by the peculiarly American institution of the spelling-bee, still survive more or less.
4
Also,
there is reason for believing that the ardent and tactless advocacy of the Simplified Spelling Board scheme by Roosevelt I in 1906 produced vastly more opposition than support, for Americans, in those days, had not yet got used to government by administrative fiat, and resented it violently whenever it touched what they regarded as their private affairs. Finally, the fact is not to be forgotten that the patronage of Andrew Carnegie, which was not confined to his subsidy but also included active propaganda,
1
likewise irritated a tender nerve. He was then the richest man in the country, and memories of the Homestead strike of 1892 were still playing about him; it was not until some time later that he began to lose his diabolical character and to be admired by the underprivileged.
The advantages of spelling reform have always been greatly exaggerated by its exponents, many of whom have been notably over-earnest and under-humorous men. As I have noted, some of them and perhaps most of them have been advocates of other and even more dubious reforms. It is, indeed, rare to find a reformer who is content with but one sure-cure for the ills of humanity. Henry Holt, the publisher, one of the stout pillars of the Simplified Spelling Board, was also a spiritualist, and at no pains to conceal it. Sir George Hunter was a Scotch wowser who also whooped up Prohibition. George Bernard Shaw supported a dozen other arcana, ranging from parlor Socialism to vegetarianism. H. G. Wells toyed with Socialism, technocracy and Basic English. And so on down the line. As long ago as 1892 the old Spelling Reform Association was constrained to issue a warning that some of its members had “zeal without knowledge.” “One of the favorite fallacies of the human mind,” it said sadly, “is that whoever means well or engages in a good work is therefore entitled, no matter how incompetent, to the sympathy and aid of all good men.”
2
Some of the favorite arguments of the reformers are so feeble as to be silly – for example, the argument that the new spelling would greatly reduce the labor of writing and the cost of paper and printing. This was first put into speculative statistics in 1849 by Alexander J. Ellis, who figured that the fearsome phonetic alphabet he
was then advocating would result in a space saving of 17%. In 1878 J. H. Gladstone, then president of the English Spelling Reform Association, figured somewhat more modestly that “the mere removal of duplicated consonants would save 1.6% and of the mute
e
’s an additional 4%.”
1
Such optimistic estimates always overlook the fact that many of the gains would be wiped out by compensatory losses. Thus the relatively mild scheme of the Simplified Spelling Society, though it reduces the seven letters of
thought
to the five of
thaut
and the six of the English
honour
to the four of
onor
, changes hundreds of other spellings without saving a single letter,
e.g., hierling
for
hireling, pakt
for
pact, taterdemaely on
for
tatterdemalion, survae
for
survey, inadekwasy
for
inadequacy
, and
furn
for
fern
, and in many other cases actually makes words longer, e.g.,
furmentaeshon
for
fermentation, florrist
for
florist, insuelaeshon
for
insulation, asoeshyaeshon
for
association, kuupae
for
coupe, eksersiez
for
exercise
, and
mateeryaliez
for
materialize
.