obtains in England only in so far as it has yielded a little more
readily to the forces which make for progress, for uniformity, for
logic, for common sense. But just how fortuitous and chaotic the
condition of English spelling is nowadays both in Great Britain and
in the United States no man knows who has not taken the trouble to
investigate for himself. In England, the reactionary orthography
of Samuel Johnson is no longer accepted by all. In America, the
revolutionary orthography of Noah Webster has been receded from even by
his own inheritors. There is no standard, no authority, not even that
of a powerful, resolute, and domineering personality.
Perhaps the attitude of philologists toward the present spelling of
the English language, and their opinion of those who are up in arms in
defense of it, have never been more tersely stated than in Professor
Lounsbury’s most admirable ‘Studies in Chaucer,’ a work which I should
term eminently scholarly, if that phrase did not perhaps give a false
impression of a book wherein the results of learning are set forth with
the most adroit literary art, and with an uninsistent but omnipresent
humor, which is a constant delight to the reader:
“There is certainly nothing more contemptible than our present
spelling, unless it be the reasons usually given for clinging to it.
The divorce which has unfortunately almost always existed between
English letters and English scholarship makes nowhere a more pointed
exhibition of itself than in the comments which men of real literary
ability make upon proposals to change or modify the cast-iron framework
in which our words are now clothed. On one side there is an absolute
agreement of view on the part of those who are authorized by their
knowledge of the subject to pronounce an opinion. These are well aware
that the present orthography hides the history of the word instead of
revealing it; that it is a stumbling-block in the way of derivation
or of pronunciation instead of a guide to it; that it is not in any
sense a growth or development, but a mechanical malformation, which
owes its existence to the ignorance of early printers and the necessity
of consulting the convenience of printing-offices. This consensus of
scholars makes the slightest possible impression upon men of letters
throughout the whole great Anglo-Saxon community. There is hardly
one of them who is not calmly confident of the superiority of his
opinion to that of the most famous special students who have spent
years in examining the subject. There is hardly one of them who does
not fancy he is manifesting a noble conservatism by holding fast to
some spelling peculiarly absurd, and thereby maintaining a bulwark
against the ruin of the tongue. There is hardly one of them who has
any hesitation in discussing the question in its entirety, while every
word he utters shows that he does not understand even its elementary
principles. There would be something thoroughly comic in turning into a
fierce international dispute the question of spelling _honor_ without
the _u_, were it not for the depression which every student of the
language cannot well help feeling in contemplating the hopeless abysmal
ignorance of the history of the tongue which any educated man must
first possess in order to become excited over the subject at all.”
(‘Studies in Chaucer,’ vol. iii., pp. 265-267.)
Pronunciation is slowly but steadily changing. Sometimes it is going
further and further away from the orthography; for example, _either_
and _neither_ are getting more and more to have in their first syllable
the long _i_ sound instead of the long _e_ sound which they had
once. Sometimes it is being modified to agree with the orthography;
for example, the older pronunciations of _again_ to rime with _men_,
and of _been_ to rime with _pin_, in which I was carefully trained as
a boy, seem to me to be giving way before a pronunciation in exact
accord with the spelling, _again_ to rime with _pain_, and _been_ to
rime with _seen_. These two illustrations are from the necessarily
circumscribed experience of a single observer, and the observation of
others may not bear me out in my opinion; but tho the illustrations
fall to the ground, the main assertion, that pronunciation is changing,
is indisputable.
No doubt the change is less rapid than it was before the invention
of printing; far less rapid than it was before the days of the
public school and of the morning newspaper. There are variations of
pronunciation in different parts of the United States and of Great
Britain, as there are variations of vocabulary; but in the future
there will be a constantly increasing tendency for these variations to
disappear. There are irresistible forces making for uniformity--forces
which are crushing out Platt-Deutsch in Germany, Provençal in France,
Romansch in Switzerland. There is a desire to see a standard set up to
which all may strive to conform. In France a standard of pronunciation
is found at the Comédie Française; and in Germany, what is almost
a standard of vocabulary has been set in what is now known as
_Bühnen-Deutsch_.
In France the Academy was constituted chiefly to be a guardian of the
language; and the Academy, properly conservative as it needs must be,
is engaged in a slow reform of French orthography, yielding to the
popular demand decorously and judiciously. By official action, also,
the orthography of German has been simplified and made more logical
and brought into closer relation with modern pronunciation. Even more
thorough reforms have been carried through in Italy, in Spain, and in
Holland. Yet neither French nor German, not Italian, Spanish, or Dutch,
stood half as much in need of the broom of reform as English, for in
no one of these languages were there so many dark corners which needed
cleaning out; in no one of them the difference between orthography and
pronunciation so wide; and in no one of them was the accepted spelling
debased by numberless false etymologies.
Beyond all question, what is needed on both sides of the Atlantic, in
the United States as well as in Great Britain, is a conviction that
the existing orthography of English is not sacred, and that to tamper
with it is not high treason. What is needed is the consciousness that
neither Samuel Johnson nor Noah Webster compiled his dictionary under
direct inspiration. What is needed is an awakening to the fact that
our spelling, so far from being immaculate at its best, is, at its
best, hardly less absurd than the haphazard, rule-of-thumb, funnily
phonetic spelling of Artemus Ward and of Josh Billings. What is needed
is anything which will break up the lethargy of satisfaction with
the accepted orthography, and help to open the eyes of readers and
writers to the stupidity of the present system and tend to make them
discontented with it.
(1892)
XIII
THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ENGLISH SPELLING
In a communication to a London review Professor W. W. Skeat remarked
that “it is notorious that all the leading philologists of Europe,
during the last quarter of a century, have unanimously condemned the
present chaotic spelling of the English language, and have received on
the part of the public generally, and of the most blatant and ignorant
among the self-constituted critics, nothing but abusive ridicule,
which is meant to be scathing, but is harmless from its silliness”;
and it cannot be denied that the orthographic simplifications which
the leading philologists of Great Britain and the United States are
advocating have not yet been widely adopted. In an aggressive article
an American essayist has sought to explain this by the assertion that
phonetic-reform “is hopelessly, unspeakably, sickeningly vulgar; and
this is an eternal reason why men and women of taste, refinement,
and discrimination will reject it with a shudder of disgust.”
Satisfactory as this explanation may seem to the essayist, I have
a certain difficulty in accepting it myself, since I find on the
list of the vice-presidents of the Orthographic Union the names of
Mr. Howells, of Colonel Higginson, of Dr. Eggleston, of Professor
Lounsbury, and of President White; and even if I was willing to admit
that these gentlemen were all of them lacking in taste, refinement, and
discrimination, I still could not agree with the aggressive essayist so
long as my own name was on the same list.
What strikes me as a better explanation is that given by the president
of the Orthographic Union, Mr. Benjamin E. Smith, who has suggested
that phonetic-reformers have asked too much, and so have received too
little; they have demanded an immediate and radical change, and as a
result they have frightened away all but the most resolute radicals;
they have failed to reckon with the immense conservatism which gives
stability to all the institutions of the English-speaking race. As
Mr. Smith puts it, “there is a deep-rooted feeling that the existing
printed form is not only _a_ symbol but the _most fitting_ symbol for
our mother-tongue, and that a radical change must impair _for us_ the
beauty and spiritual effectiveness of that which it symbolizes.”
A part of the unreadiness of the public to listen to the advocates of
phonetic-reform has been due also to the general consciousness that
pronunciation is not fixed but very variable indeed, being absolutely
alike in no two places where English is spoken, and perhaps in no two
persons who speak English. The humorous poet has shown to us how the
little word _vase_ once served as a shibboleth to reveal the homes of
each of the four young ladies who came severally from New York and
Boston and Philadelphia and Kalamazoo. The difference between the
pronunciation of New York and Boston is not so marked as that between
London and Edinburgh--or as that between New York and London. And the
pronunciation of to-day is not that of to-morrow; it is constantly
being modified, sometimes by imperceptible degrees and sometimes by a
sudden change like the arbitrary substitution of _aither_ and _naither_
for _eether_ and _neether_. Now, if pronunciation is not uniform in any
two persons, in any two places, at any two periods, the wayfaring man
is not to blame if he is in doubt, first, as to the possibility of a
uniform phonetic spelling, and, second, as to its permanence even if it
was once to be attained.
A glance down the history of English orthography discloses the fact
that, however chaotic our spelling may seem to be now or may seem to
have been in Shakspere’s day, it is and it always has been striving
ineffectively to be phonetic. Always the attempt has been to use
the letters of the word to represent its sounds. From the beginning
there has been an unceasing struggle to keep the orthography as
phonetic as might be. This continuous striving toward exactness of
sound-reproduction has never been radical or violent; it has always
been halting and half-hearted: but it has been constant, and it has
accomplished marvels in the course of the centuries. The most that
we can hope to do is to help along this good work, to hasten this
inevitable but belated progress, to make the transitions as easy as
possible, and to smooth the way so that the needful improvements may
follow one another as swiftly as shall be possible. We must remember
that a half-loaf is better than no bread; and we must remind ourselves
frequently that the greatest statesmen have been opportunists, knowing
what they wanted, but taking what they could get.
We have now to face the fact that in no language is a sudden and
far-reaching reform in spelling ever likely to be attained; and in
none is it less likely than in English. The history of the peoples who
use our tongue on both sides of the Atlantic proves that they belong
to a stock which is wont to make haste slowly, to take one step at a
time, and never to allow itself to be overmastered by mere logic.
By a series of gradations almost invisible the loose confederacy of
1776 developed into the firm union of 1861, which was glad to grant to
Abraham Lincoln a power broader than that wielded by any dictator. Even
the abolition of the corn-laws and the adoption of free-trade in Great
Britain, sudden as it may seem, was only the final result of a long
series of events.
The securing of an absolutely phonetic spelling being
impracticable,--even if it was altogether desirable,--the efforts of
those who are dissatisfied with the prevailing orthography of our
language had best be directed toward the perfectly practical end of
getting our improvement on the instalment plan. We must seek now to
have only the most flagrant absurdities corrected. We must be satisfied
to advance little by little. We must begin by showing that there is
nothing sacrosanct about the present spelling either in Great Britain
or in the United States. We must make it clear to all who are willing
to listen--and it is our duty to be persuasive always and never
dogmatic--that the effort of the English language to rid itself of
orthographic anomalies is almost as old as the language itself. We
must show those who insist on leaving the present spelling undisturbed
that in taking this attitude they are setting themselves in opposition
to the past, which they pretend to respect. The average man is open
to conviction if you do not try to browbeat him into adopting your
beliefs; and he can be induced to accept improvements, one at a time,
if he has it made plain to him that each of these is but one in a
series unrolling itself since Chaucer. We must convince the average
man that we want merely to continue the good work of our forefathers,
and that the real innovators are those who maintain the absolute
inviolability of our present spelling.
Even the vehement essayist from whom I have quoted already, and who
is the boldest of later opponents of phonetic-reform, is vehement
chiefly against the various schemes of wholesale revision. He himself
refuses to make any modification,--except to revert now and again to
a medievalism like _pædagogue_,--but he knows the history of language
too well not to be forced to admit that a simplification of some sort
is certain to be achieved in the future. “The written forms of English
words will change in time, as the language itself will change,” he
confesses; “it will change in its vocabulary, in its idioms, in its
pronunciation, and perhaps to some extent in its structural form. For
change is the one essential and inevitable phenomenon of a living
language, as it is of any living organism; and with these changes, slow
and silent and unconscious, will come a change in the orthography.” As
we read this admirable statement we cannot but wonder why a writer who
understands so well the conditions of linguistic growth should wish to
bind his own language in the cast-iron bonds of an outworn orthography.
We may wonder also why he is not consistent in his own practice, and
why he does not spell _phænomenon_ as Macaulay did only threescore and
ten years ago.
Underneath the American essayist’s objection to any orthographic
simplification in English, and underneath the plaintive protests of
certain British men of letters against “American spelling,” so called,
lies the assumption that there is at the present moment a “regular”
spelling, which has existed time out of mind and which the tasteless
reformers wish to destroy. For this assumption there is no warrant
whatever. The orthography of our language has never been stable; it
has always been fluctuating; and no authority has ever been given to
anybody to lay down laws for its regulation. For a convention to have
validity it must have won general acceptance at some period; and the
history of English shows that there has never been any such common
agreement, expressed or implied, in regard to English spelling. Some of
the unphonetic forms which are most vigorously defended, as hallowed by
custom and by sentiment, are comparatively recent; and others which
seem as sacred have had foisted into them needless letters conveying
false impressions about their origins.
That there is no theory or practice of English orthography universally
accepted to-day is obvious to all who may take the trouble to observe
for themselves. The spelling adopted by the ‘Century Magazine’ is
different from that to be found in ‘Harper’s Magazine’; and this
differs again from that insisted upon in the pages of the ‘Bookman.’
The ‘Century’ has gone a little in advance of American spelling
generally, as seen in ‘Harper’s,’ and the ‘Bookman’ is intentionally
reactionary. In the United States orthography is in a healthier state
of instability than it is in Great Britain, where there is a closer
approximation to a deadening uniformity; but even in London and
Edinburgh those who are on the watch can discover many a divergence
from the strict letter of the doctrine of orthographic rigidity.
And just as there is no system of English spelling tacitly agreed on by
all men of education using the English language at present, so there
was also no system of English spelling consistently and continually
used by our ancestors in the past. The orthography of Matthew Arnold
differs a little, altho not much, from the orthography of Macaulay; and
that in turn a little from the orthography of Johnson. In like manner
the spelling of Dryden is very different from the spelling of Spenser,
and the spelling of Spenser is very different from the spelling of
Chaucer. At no time in the long unrolling of English literature from
Chaucer to Arnold has there been any agreement among those who used the
language as to any precise way in which its words should be spelled
or even as to any theory which should govern particular instances.
The history of English orthography is a record still incomplete of
incessant variation; and a study of it shows plainly how there have
been changes in every generation, some of them logical and some of them
arbitrary, some of them helpful simplifications, and some of them gross
perversities.
Thus we see that those who defend any existing orthography, which
they choose to regard as “regular” and outside of which they affect
to behold only vulgar aberration, are setting themselves against the
example left us by our forefathers. We see also that those of us who
are striving to modify our spelling in moderation are doing exactly
what has been done by every generation that preceded us. To repeat
in other words what I have said already, there is not any system of
English orthography which is supported by a universal convention to-day
or which has any sanctity from its supposed antiquity.
The opponents of simplification have been greatly aided by the
general acceptance of this assumption of theirs that the advocates
of simplification wanted to remove ancient landmarks, to break with
the past, to introduce endless innovations. The best part of their
case will fall to the ground when it is generally understood that the
orthography of our language has never been fixed for a decad at a
time. And this understanding of the real facts of the situation is
likely to be enlarged in the immediate future by the wide circulation
of many recent reprints of the texts of the great authors of the past
in the exact spelling of the original edition. So long as we were
in the habit of seeing the works of Shakspere and Steele, of Scott,
Thackeray, and Hawthorne, all in an orthography which, if not uniform
exactly, did not vary widely, we were sorely tempted to say that the
spelling which was good enough for them is good enough for us and for
our children.
But when we have in our hands the works of those great writers as they
were originally printed, and when we are forced to remark that they
spell in no wise alike one to the other; and when we discover that such
uniformity of orthography they may have seemed to have was due, not to
any theory of the authors themselves, but merely to the practice of
the modern printing-offices and proof-readers--when these things are
brought home to us, any superstitious reverence bids fair to vanish
which we may have had for the orthography we believed to be Shakspere’s
and Steele’s and Scott’s and Thackeray’s and Hawthorne’s.
And one indirect result of this scholarly desire to get as near as may
be to the masterpiece as the author himself presented it to the world,
is that men of letters and lovers of literature--two classes hitherto
strangely ignorant of the history of the English language and of the
constant changes always going on in its vocabulary, in its syntax,
and in its orthography--will at least have the chance to acquire
information at first hand. Their resistance to simplification ought
to become less irreconcilable when the men of letters, now its chief
opponents, have discovered for themselves that there is not now and
never has been any stable system of orthography. When they really grasp
the fact that there has been no permanency in the past and that there
is no uniformity in the present, perhaps they will show themselves
less unwilling to take the next step forward. Just now they are rather
like the Tories, who, as Aubrey de Vere declared, wanted to uninvent
printing and to undiscover America.
The most powerful single influence in fixing the present absurd
spelling of our language was undoubtedly Johnson’s Dictionary,
published in the middle of the eighteenth century. We cannot but
respect the solid learning of Dr. Johnson and his indomitable energy;
but the making of an English dictionary was not the task for which his
previous studies had preëminently fitted him. Probably he would have
succeeded better with a Latin dictionary; and indeed there is something
characteristically incongruous in the spectacle of the burly doctor’s
spending his toil in compiling a list of the words in a language the
use of which he held to be disgraceful in a friend’s epitaph. Johnson
was, in fact, as unfit a person as could be found to record English
orthography, a task calling for a science the existence of which he
did not even suspect, and for a delicacy of perception he lacked
absolutely. In all matters of taste he was an elephantine pachyderm;
and there are only a few of his principles of criticism which are not
now disestablished.
Any one whose reading is at all varied and who strays outside of books
printed within the past quarter-century, can find abundant evidence
of the former chaos of English orthography. In Moxon’s ‘Mechanic
Exercises,’ published in 1683, for example, we read that “how well
other Forrain languages are Corrected by the Author, we may perceive
by the English that is Printed in Forrain Countries”; and this shows
us that the phonetic form _forrain_ is older than the unphonetic
_foreign_. In the ‘Spectator’ (No. 510) Steele wrote _landskip_ where
we should now write _landscape_; in Addison’s criticism of ‘Paradise
Lost,’ contributed to the same periodical, we find _critick_,
_heroick_, and _epick_; and whether Steele or Addison held the pen,
_ribbons_ were then always _ribands_.
On the title-page of the first edition of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ published
in 1719, we are told that we can read within “an account of how he was
at last strangely delivered by _Pyrates_.” Fielding, in the ‘Champion’
in 1740, tells us that “dinner soon follow’d, being a gammon of bacon
and some chickens, with a most excellent apple-_pye_.” In the same
essay Fielding wrote that “our friends _exprest_ great pleasure at our
drinking”; and in ‘Tom Jones’ he wrote _profest_ for _professed_ (as we
should now spell it). Here we discover that the nineteenth century is
sometimes more backward than the eighteenth, _profest_ and _exprest_
being the very spellings which many are now advocating. Fielding also
wrote _Salique_ where we should now write _Salic_, as Wotton had
written _Dorique_ for _Doric_ in a letter to Milton; and here the
advantage is with us. So it is also in our spelling of the italicized
word in the playbill of the third night of Mr. Cooper’s engagement at
the Charleston theater, Friday, April 18, 1796: “_Smoaking_ in the
Theatre Prohibited.”
Attention has already been called to Macaulay’s _phænomenon_ (and to
Professor Peck’s _pædagogue_). The abolition of the digraph has been a
protracted enterprise not yet completed. In a translation of Schlegel’s
‘Lectures on Dramatic Literature,’ published in London early in the
nineteenth century, I have found _æra_ for _era_; and in the eighteenth
century _economics_ was _œconomics_. _Esthetic_ has not yet quite
expelled _æsthetic_, altho _anesthetic_ seems now fairly established.