If you are not, I do not think I can do much to console you,
because when a man has been irritated into that position where the
alleged beauty of a letter counts in so serious a question, he is
probably beyond mortal help.
I have no desire "to reach the differences in vowel sounds that
prevail in the United States". There is not much difference among
cultivated people. Probably a fair standard would be the
conversation at the Century Club, where there are visitors from
Maine to California, and hardly any noticeable difference in
pronunciation.
There seems to be no disagreement among authorities that a
simplified spelling would save a great deal of time among
children....
Of course I have not been able to answer most of the letters I
have received on the subject. I single yours out because you have
had a fall from grace, and I feel guilty of having had something
to do with it, by presenting stronger meat than was necessary, in
our January number. I have fought on the Executive Committee of
the Spelling Board against publishing anything of the English
S.S.S.'s proposed improvements, for fear of arousing such
prejudice as yours; and yet in our first number, I was insensibly
led into, myself, publishing things that looked just as
outlandish.
As I said at the outset, I hope you feel better since seeing the
April-June number, and should be glad to know how you do feel.
From his reply:
Thank you very much for the courtesy of your letter of 9th April.
I was surprised to receive it, as I did not suppose that your
multifarious duties would permit you to notice my rather feeble
protest. I was somewhat amused that you should think my irritation
so extreme as to call for an effort to console me. I am sure I
appreciate your attempt to do so. But really, I was not so hard
hit as you thought, because I do not expect in my day (I am no
longer a young man) to see the champions of "simplified spelling"
(some of it seems to me the reverse of "simplified") gain such
headway as to materially mar my pleasure in the printed page, for
I do not believe you will allow the atrocities of the last few
pages of your first number to creep into the delightful essays
which render THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW such pleasant and profitable
reading....
I do not think any great respect is due the opinion of those who
think that a simplified spelling would save a great deal of time
among children, for it also seems to have its rules which will
present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of
our present system....
Why _thru_? U does not always have the sound of double _o_--very
rarely in fact. Why not _throo_--if the aim is to make the written
sign correspond to the sound. Thru suggests _huh_.
From our answer:
Regarding "thru", you justly say that _u_ does not always have the
sound of _oo_. The only sound of _oo_ worthy of respect, with
which I have an acquaintance, is in "door" and "floor". The idea
of using it to represent a _u_ sound is perhaps the culminating
absurdity of our spelling.
Your statement that simplified spelling "seems to have its rules
which will present as much difficulty to memorize as do the
peculiarities of our present system" overlooks the advantage that
writing with a phonetic alphabet, like those of Europe, has over
writing with purely conventional characters, as in China. Now
English writing is probably the least phonetic in Europe.
Simplifying it in any of the well-known proposed methods would be
making it more phonetic, and consequently easier. At present it is
a mass of contradictions, and the rules that can be extracted from
it are overburdened with exceptions. Simplification will decrease
both the exceptions and the rules themselves. There are now
several ways of representing each of many sounds, and therefore
several "rules" to be learned for each of such sounds.
Simplification will tend to reduce those rules to one for each
sound, and so far as it succeeds, will _not_ "present as much
difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present
system."
All the degrees of reformed spelling now in use are professedly but
transitional. They may gradually advance into a respectable degree of
consistency, but we expect that to be reached quicker by a coherent
survival among the warring elements proposed by the S.S.S., the S.S.B. and
the better individual reformers. Probably there is already more agreement
than disagreement among these elements.
While the others are fighting it out, the various transition styles will
do something to prepare parents to accept a more nearly perfect style for
their children, and perhaps take an interest in seeing the various
counsels of perfection fight each other.
A few words have already found their way into advertisements--_tho_,
_thru_, _thoro_ (a damnable way of spelling _thurro_), and the shortened
terminal _gram(me)s_, _og(ue)s_ and _et(te)s_; and these and a few more
have found their way into correspondence on commonplace subjects; and the
interest in the topic, especially among educators, is spreading. But most
of the inconsistencies will probably bother and delay children and
forreners until they are given something with some approach to
consistency.
* * * * *
After we fight to something like agreement on a system, how are we to get
it going?
It does not seem extravagant to expect that as soon as the weight of
scholarly opinion endorses a vocabulary from our present alphabet
consistent enough to afford a base for a reasonable spelling book,
spelling books and readers will be prepared for the schools, and adopted
by advanced teachers. Many are clamoring for such now. When the youngsters
have mastered these, which they will do in a small fraction of the time
wasted on their present books, they will of their own accord pick up
without troubling their teachers a knowledge of the present forms. This
they have always done when their teaching has been by the various phonetic
methods with special letters, and have done both in much less time than
they have needed for learning in the ordinary way. But they will prefer
the reasonable forms, and this demand the publishers will probably not be
slow to supply.