dweller (where he was born--from _manoir_ to dwell), the
inhabitant of a homestead, (2) a countryman, (3) a clown or boor,
a coarse fellow.]
{222} [These words lie totally apart. ‘Brat’, an infant, seems a
figurative use of ‘brat’, a rag or pinafore, just as ‘bantling’
comes from ‘band’, a swathe.]
{223} “We cannot always be contemplative, or _pragmatical_ abroad: but
have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged
soul may leave off awhile her severe schooling”. (Milton,
_Tetrachordon_.)
{224} [Anglo-Saxon _cnafa_, or _cnapa_, a boy.]
{225} [Mr. Fitzedward Hall in 1873 says ‘antecedents’ is “not yet a
generation old” (_Mod. English_, 303). Landor in 1853 says “the
French have lately taught (it to) us” (_Last Fruit of an Old
Tree_, 176). De Quincey, in 1854 calls it “modern slang” (_Works_
xiv, 449); and the earliest quotation, 1841, given in the N.E.D.,
introduces it as “what the French call their antecedents”.]
{226} See Whewell, _History of Moral Philosophy in England_, pp.
xxvii.-xxxii.
{227} For a fuller treatment of the subject of this lecture, see my
_Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in senses
different from their present_, 2nd ed. London, 1859.
V
CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS
When I announce to you that the subject of my lecture to-day will be
English orthography, or the spelling of the words in our native
language, with the alterations which this has undergone, you may perhaps
think with yourselves that a weightier, or, if not a weightier, at all
events a more interesting subject might have occupied this our
concluding lecture. I cannot admit it to be wanting either in importance
or in interest. Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well engage,
as it often has engaged, the attention of those with far higher
acquirements than any which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by
faults in the manner of treating it; but I am sure it ought as little to
be this; and would never prove so in competent hands{228}. Let us then
address ourselves to this matter, not without good hope that it may
yield us both profit and pleasure.
I know not who it was that said, “The invention of printing was very
well; but, as compared to the invention of writing, it was no such great
matter after all”. Whoever it was who made this observation, it is clear
that for him use and familiarity had not obliterated the wonder which
there is in that, whereat we probably have long ceased to wonder at
all--the power, namely, of representing sounds by written signs, of
reproducing for the eye that which existed at first only for the ear:
nor was the estimate which he formed of the relative value of these two
inventions other than a just one. Writing indeed stands more nearly on a
level with speaking, and deserves rather to be compared with it, than
with printing; which, with all its utility, is yet of altogether another
and inferior type of greatness: or, if this is too much to claim for
writing, it may at any rate be affirmed to stand midway between the
other two, and to be as much superior to the one as it is inferior to
the other.
The intention of the written word, that which presides at its first
formation, the end whereunto it is a mean, is by aid of symbols agreed
on beforehand, to represent to the eye with as much accuracy as possible
the spoken word.
{Sidenote: _Imperfection of Writing_}
It never fulfils this intention completely, and by degrees more and more
imperfectly. Short as man’s spoken word often falls of his thought, his
written word falls often as short of his spoken. Several causes
contribute to this. In the first place, the marks of imperfection and
infirmity cleave to writing, as to every other invention of man. All
alphabets have been left incomplete. They have superfluous letters,
letters, that is, which they do not want, because other letters already
represent the sound which they represent; they have dubious letters,
letters, that is, which say nothing certain about the sounds they stand
for, because more than one sound is represented by them--our ‘c’ for
instance, which sometimes has the sound of ‘s’, as in ‘_c_ity’,
sometimes of ‘k’, as in ‘_c_at’; they are deficient in letters, that is,
the language has elementary sounds which have no corresponding letters
appropriated to them, and can only be represented by combinations of
letters. All alphabets, I believe, have some of these faults, not a few
of them have all, and more. This then is one reason of the imperfect
reproduction of the spoken word by the written. But another is, that the
human voice is so wonderfully fine and flexible an organ, is able to
mark such subtle and delicate distinctions of sound, so infinitely to
modify and vary these sounds, that were an alphabet complete as human
art could make it, did it possess eight and forty instead of four and
twenty letters, there would still remain a multitude of sounds which it
could only approximately give back{229}.
{Sidenote: _Alphabets Inadequate_}
But there is a further cause for the divergence which comes gradually to
find place between men’s spoken and their written words. What men do
often, they will seek to do with the least possible trouble. There is
nothing which they do oftener than repeat words; they will seek here
then to save themselves pains; they will contract two or more syllables
into one; (‘toto opere’ will become ‘topper’; ‘vuestra merced’, ‘usted’;
and ‘topside the other way’, ‘topsy-turvey’{230}); they will slur over,
and thus after a while cease to pronounce, certain letters; for hard
letters they will substitute soft; for those which require a certain
effort to pronounce, they will substitute those which require little or
none. Under the operation of these causes a gulf between the written and
spoken word will not merely exist; but it will have the tendency to grow
ever wider and wider. This tendency indeed will be partially
counterworked by approximations which from time to time will by silent
consent be made of the written word to the spoken; here and there a
letter dropped in speech will be dropped also in writing, as the ‘s’ in
so many French words, where its absence is marked by a circumflex; a new
shape, contracted or briefer, which a word has taken on the lips of men,
will find its representation in their writing; as ‘chirurgeon’ will not
merely be pronounced, but also spelt, ‘surgeon’, and ‘synodsman’
‘sidesman’. Still for all this, and despite of these partial
readjustments of the relations between the two, the anomalies will be
infinite; there will be a multitude of written letters which have ceased
to be sounded letters; a multitude of words will exist in one shape upon
our lips, and in quite another in our books.
It is inevitable that the question should arise--Shall these anomalies
be meddled with? shall it be attempted to remove them, and bring writing
and speech into harmony and consent--a harmony and consent which never
indeed in actual fact at any period of the language existed, but which
yet may be regarded as the object of written speech, as the idea which,
however imperfectly realized, has, in the reduction of spoken sounds to
written, floated before the minds of men? If the attempt is to be made,
it is clear that it can only be made in one way. The alternative is not
open, whether Mahomet shall go to the mountain, _or_ the mountain to
Mahomet. The spoken word is the mountain; it will not stir; it will
resist all interference. It feels its own superior rights, that it
existed the first, that it is, so to say, the elder brother; and it will
never be induced to change itself for the purpose of conforming and
complying with the written word. Men will not be persuaded to pronounce
‘wou_l_d’ and ‘de_b_t’, because they write ‘would’ and ‘debt’ severally
with an ‘l’ and with a ‘b’: but what if they could be induced to write
‘woud’ and ‘det’, because they pronounce so; and to deal in like manner
with all other words, in which there exists at present a discrepancy
between the word as it is spoken, and the word as it is written?
{Sidenote: _Phonetic Systems_}
Here we have the explanation of that which in the history of almost all
literatures has repeated itself more than once, namely, the endeavour to
introduce phonetic writing. It has certain plausibilities to rest on; it
has its appeal to the unquestionable fact that the written word was
intended to picture to the eye what the spoken word sounded in the ear.
At the same time I believe that it would be impossible to introduce it;
and, even if it _were_ possible, that it would be most undesirable, and
this for two reasons; the first being that the losses consequent upon
its introduction, would far outweigh the gains, even supposing those
gains as great as the advocates of the scheme promise; the second, that
these promised gains would themselves be only very partially realized,
or not at all.
{Sidenote: _Alphabets Imperfect_}
In the first place, I believe it to be impossible. It is clear that such
a scheme must begin with the reconstruction of the alphabet. The first
thing that the phonographers have perceived is the necessity for the
creation of a vast number of new signs, the poverty of all existing
alphabets, at any rate of our own, not yielding a several sign for all
the several sounds in the language. Our English phonographers have
therefore had to invent ten of these new signs or letters, which are
henceforth to take their place with our _a_, _b_, _c_, and to enjoy
equal rights with them. Rejecting two (_q_, _x_), and adding ten, they
have raised their alphabet from twenty-six letters to thirty-four. But
to procure the reception of such a reconstructed alphabet is simply an
impossibility, as much an impossibility as would be the reconstitution
of the structure of the language in any points where it was manifestly
deficient or illogical. Sciolists or scholars may sit down in their
studies, and devise these new letters, and prove that we need them, and
that the introduction of them would be a great gain, and a manifest
improvement; and this may be all very true; but if they think they can
induce a people to adopt them, they know little of the ways in which its
alphabet is entwined with the whole innermost life of a people. One may
freely own that all present alphabets are redundant here, are deficient
there; our English perhaps is as greatly at fault as any, and with that
we have chiefly to do. Unquestionably it has more letters than one to
express one and the same sound; it has only one letter to express two or
three sounds; it has sounds which are only capable of being expressed at
all by awkward and roundabout expedients. Yet at the same time we must
accept the fact, as we accept any other which it is out of our power to
change--with regret, indeed, but with a perfect acquiescence: as one
accepts the fact that Ireland is not some thirty or forty miles nearer
to England--that it is so difficult to get round Cape Horn--that the
climate of Africa is so fatal to European life. A people will no more
quit their alphabet than they will quit their language; they will no
more consent to modify the one _ab extra_ than the other. Cæsar avowed
that with all his power he could not introduce a new word, and certainly
Claudius could not introduce a new letter. Centuries may sanction the
bringing in of a new one, or the dropping of an old. But to imagine that
it is possible to suddenly introduce a group of ten new letters, as
these reformers propose--they might just as feasibly propose that the
English language should form its comparatives and superlatives on some
entirely new scheme, say in Greek fashion, by the terminations ‘oteros’
and ‘otatos’; or that we should agree to set up a dual; or that our
substantives should return to our Anglo-Saxon declensions. Any one of
these or like proposals would not betray a whit more ignorance of the
eternal laws which regulate human language, and of the limits within
which deliberate action upon it is possible, than does this of
increasing our alphabet by ten entirely novel signs.
But grant it possible, grant our six and twenty letters to have so
little sacredness in them that Englishmen would endure a crowd of
upstart interlopers to mix themselves on an equal footing with them,
still this could only be from a sense of the greatness of the advantage
to be derived from this introduction. Now the vast advantage claimed by
the advocates of the system is, that it would facilitate the learning to
read, and wholly save the labour of learning to spell, which “on the
present plan occupies”, as they assure us, “at the very lowest
calculation from three to five years”. Spelling, it is said, would no
longer need to be learned at all; since whoever knew the sound, would
necessarily know also the spelling, this being in all cases in perfect
conformity with that. The anticipation of this gain rests upon two
assumptions which are tacitly taken for granted, but both of them
erroneous.
The first of these assumptions is, that all men pronounce all words
alike, so that whenever they come to spell a word, they will exactly
agree as to what the outline of its sound is. Now we are sure men will
not do this from the fact that, before there was any fixed and settled
orthography in our language, when therefore everybody was more or less a
phonographer, seeking to write down the word as it sounded to _him_,
(for he had no other law to guide him,) the variations of spelling were
infinite. Take for instance the word ‘sudden’; which does not seem to
promise any great scope for variety. I have myself met with this word
spelt in the following fifteen ways among our early writers: ‘sodain’,
‘sodaine’, ‘sodan’, ‘sodayne’, ‘sodden’, ‘sodein’, ‘sodeine’, ‘soden’,
‘sodeyn’, ‘suddain’, ‘suddaine’, ‘suddein’, ‘suddeine’, ‘sudden’,
‘sudeyn’. Again, in how many ways was Raleigh’s name spelt, or
Shakespeare’s? The same is evident from the spelling of uneducated
persons in our own day. They have no other rule but the sound to guide
them. How is it that they do not all spell alike; erroneously, it may
be, as having only the sound for their guide, but still falling all into
exactly the same errors? What is the actual fact? They not merely spell
wrong, which might be laid to the charge of our perverse system of
spelling, but with an inexhaustible diversity of error, and that too in
the case of simplest words. Thus the little town of Woburn would seem to
give small room for caprice in spelling, while yet the postmaster there
has made, from the superscription of letters that have passed through
his hands, a collection of two hundred and forty-four varieties of ways
in which the place has been spelt{231}. It may be replied that these
were all or nearly all from the letters of the ignorant and uneducated.
Exactly so;--but it is for their sakes, and to place them on a level
with the educated, or rather to accelerate their education by the
omission of a useless yet troublesome discipline, that the change is
proposed. I wish to show you that after the change they would be just as
much, or almost as much, at a loss in their spelling as now.
{Sidenote: _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”.
{Sidenote: _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}.
{Sidenote: _Pronunciation Alters_}
At present it is the written word which is in all languages their
conservative element. In it is the abiding witness against the
mutilations or other capricious changes in their shape which
affectation, folly, ignorance, and half-knowledge would introduce. It is
not indeed always able to hinder the final adoption of these corrupter
forms, but does not fail to oppose to them a constant, and very often a
successful, resistance. With the adoption of phonetic spelling, this
witness would exist no longer; whatever was spoken would have also to be
written, let it be never so barbarous, never so great a departure from
the true form of the word. Nor is it merely probable that such a
barbarizing process, such an adopting and sanctioning of a vulgarism,
might take place, but among phonographers it already has taken place. We
all probably are aware that there is a vulgar pronunciation of the word
‘Eu_rope_’, as though it were ‘Eu_rup_’. Now it is quite possible that
numerically more persons in England may pronounce the word in this
manner than in the right; and therefore the phonographers are only true
to their principles when they spell it in the fashion which they do,
‘Eurup’, or indeed omitting the E at the beginning, ‘Urup’{234} with
thus the life of the first syllable assailed no less than that of the
second. What are the consequences? First its relations with the old
mythology are at once and entirely broken off; secondly, its most
probable etymology from two Greek words, signifying ‘broad’ and ‘face’,
Europe being so called from the _Broad_ line or _face_ of coast which
our continent presented to the Asiatic Greek, is totally obscured. But
so far from the spelling servilely following the pronunciation, I should
be bold to affirm that if ninety-nine out of every hundred persons in
England chose to call Europe ‘Urup’, this would be a vulgarism still,
against which the written word ought to maintain its protest, not
sinking down to their level, but rather seeking to elevate them to its
own{235}.
{Sidenote: _Changes of Pronunciation_}
And if there is much in orthography which is unsettled now, how much
more would be unsettled then. Inasmuch as the pronunciation of words is
continually altering, their spelling would of course have continually to
alter too. For the fact that pronunciation is undergoing constant
changes, although changes for the most part unmarked, or marked only by
a few, would be abundantly easy to prove. Take a Pronouncing Dictionary
of fifty or a hundred years ago; turn to almost any page, and you will
observe schemes of pronunciation there recommended, which are now merely
vulgarisms, or which have been dropped altogether. We gather from a
discussion in Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_{236}, that in his time ‘great’
was by some of the best speakers of the language pronounced ‘gr_ee_t’,
not ‘gr_a_te’: Pope usually rhymes it with ‘cheat’, ‘complete’, and the
like; thus in the _Dunciad_:
“Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the _great_,
There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines com_plete_”.
Spenser’s constant use of the word a century and a half earlier, leaves
no doubt that such was the invariable pronunciation of his time{237}.
Again, Pope rhymes ‘obliged’ with ‘beseiged’; and it has only ceased to
be ‘obl_ee_ged’ almost in our own time. Who now drinks a cup of ‘tay’?
yet there is abundant evidence that this was the fashionable
pronunciation in the first half of the last century; the word, that is,
was still regarded as French: Locke writes it ‘thé’; and in Pope’s time,
though no longer written, it was still pronounced so. Take this couplet
of his in proof:
“Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms _obey_,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes _tea_”.
So too a pronunciation which still survives, though scarcely among
well-educated persons, I mean ‘Room’ for ‘Rome’, must have been in
Shakespeare’s time the predominant one, else there would have been no
point in that play on words where in _Julius Cæsar_ Cassius, complaining
that in all _Rome_ there was not _room_ for a single man, exclaims,