Care of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW.
A few hundred persons of the kind whose help is sought by this
advertisement would have the salvation of the republic in their hands. But
somehow those who have the leisure generally lack the desire; and those
who have the desire generally lack the leisure.
_Simplified Spelling_
After receiving, in answer to the invitation in our first number, a few
bitter objections to simplified spelling, we have felt like apologizing
each time we approached the subject. Perhaps the best apology we can make
is that apparently the majority of our readers are interested in it.
Therefore we hope that the others will tolerate as equably as they can,
the devotion of a little space to it in the interest of the majority.
Perhaps the objectors may ultimately be able to settle the difficulty as
we and our house have settled another unconquerable nuisance--the
dandelions on our lawns--: we have concluded to like them.
Our recent correspondence regarding Simplified Spelling has developed a
few points which we submit to those who abominate it, those who favor it,
and those who, like the eminent school-superintendent we have already
quoted, and like ourselves for that matter, do both:
To a leading Professor of Greek:
I am more hopeful than you that the repetition of a consonant
beginning the second syllable of a dissyllable, to close the
preceding syllable, as in "differ", "fiddle", "gobble", etc.,
_wil_ "be generally accepted", especially in view of the fact that
it is _alreddy_ "generally accepted", and needs only to be
extended to a minority of words.
"Annutther" is not "a fair illustration". On the contrary, it is
an exception that I probably was very injudicious to call any
attention to; and the trouble with you scholars, I find all the
way thru, is that you permit those little exceptions to influence
you too much. If a good simplification is ever effected, it will
be by cutting Gordian knots, and you all of you seem absolutely
incapable of anything of the kind. I don't expect anyhow to make
much out of a man who will spell "peepl" "peopl". Imagine all this
said with a grin, not a frown!!
You wil never get back to "the old sounds" of the vowels, in God's
world.
As to the long sounds, I am going in for all I am worth on the
double vowels. I alreddy agree with the English Society on
"faather", "feel" and "scuul", and am going to do all I can for
_niit_, and for spredding the _oo_ in _floor_ and _door_ into
_snore_, _more_, _hole_, _poke_, etc. "Awl", "cow" and "go" are
spelt wel, and their spelling shoud be spred. These seem to be the
lines of least resistance. I find that they work first-rate in my
own riting.
You make enuf serious objections to diacritical marks, but my
serious objection to them is that they ar obstacles to lerners,
especially forreners.
From his answer:
All right; I catch the grin, and cheerfully grin back. The
business of a scholar (Emerson's "man thinking", Plato's [Greek:
philosophos]) is to take as long views as he can; in this case, to
look far beyond the possibilities of my life-time. The more you
people with the shorter views, as I venture to think them, agitate
for and practise each little partial solution, the more you help
on the threshing out which must go on for many years before we can
arrive at any general solution. So, more power to your elbow!
Meantime my own spelling will continue to be--like the
conventional spelling of the printers of today--a hodge-podge of
inconsistencies, quite indefensible on rational grounds, and
varying with circumstances. Of course the rational way to spell
_people_ is _piipl_, or _pipl_.
Which we think is an attempt to bolster up a lost cause.
From another reader:
Your closing sentence in the first number of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW
states with a most distressing combination of vowels and
outlandish collocation of consonants that you would like to hear
from your readers on the subject.... Z is not a pretty letter, and
to see it so frequently usurping the place so long held by s is
far from gratifying to the eye....
Suppose you establish to your own satisfaction a method for
assigning sound values; how will you reach the differences in
vowel sounds that prevail in the United States? The New
Englander's mouthing of _a_ differs from that of the Northern New
Yorker, and both differ greatly from that of the
Southerner--indeed, in the different Southern States there is
variation.... At first I was interested in simplified spelling,
but the eccentricities developed by its advocates alienated me
long since, so I beg of you, drop it.
From our answer:
I delayed thanking you for your letter of the 29th until there
should be time for you to see the April-June number.