540 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tion having undergone since that time considerable change which the written 

 form does not indicate. 



M. Paul Meyer then calls attention to the fact that " the great ob- 

 stacle to the development of a spelling both logical and suited to our 

 language has been the inadequacy of the Latin alphabet, which could 

 not express sounds originating after the Latin period." 



In the sixteenth century various expedients were suggested to remedy this 

 poverty of symbols. About 1530, Geoffrey Tory, a printer, introduced the use 

 of the cedilla, already known among the Italians and Spaniards, to indicate 

 the sibilant sound of c ; but it occurred to no one to employ a similar device to 

 distinguish the two sounds of g. Geoffrey Tory also used the accent aigu ('), 

 but without giving it exactly the value it has to-day; he made use of it solely 

 to distinguish the e pronounced from the e mute. The accent grave, which 

 distinguished the open e from the closed, was not introduced until much later. 

 In 1562 Ramus succeeded in having the distinctions between i and ;', between 

 u and v, pass into common use. 



He shows clearly that French spelling has suffered from some of 

 the same unfortunate influences which have reduced English spelling 

 to its lamentable condition: 



In spite of its lack of uniformity, written French had had until then a 

 phonetic tendency. Unfortunately, there was an antagonistic movement under 

 the influence of humanism, which introduced into the notation of speech certain 

 silent letters to indicate the derivation of words: they wrote aultre, advocat, 

 doigt, droict, faict, poids, scavoir, soubs, subject, etc., in order to make the true 

 or supposed etymology of these words visible. This was absurd; there was no 

 need to put an I in autre to represent that in the Latin alter, which was already 

 shown by the u (altre, autre). These 'superfluities,' so called by the Abbe" 

 d'Olivet, editor-in-chief of the third edition of the ' Dictionaire de l'Academie ' 

 (1740), in a great many cases, but not in all, have been expunged from the 

 language. 



Similar superfluities abound in English still, and they are still 

 defended by arguments like those contained in the preface to the first 

 dictionary of the French Academy (1694). "The Academy adheres 

 to the old spellings accepted among men of letters, because they aid 

 in showing the origin of the words. That is why the academy believes 

 that it ought not to authorize the abridgments which certain individuals, 

 chiefly printers, have made, because these omissions destroy every 

 vestige of the analogy and relation between words that are derived 

 from Latin, or from any other language. Thus the words corps and 

 iemps are given with a p, and the words teste, honneste with an s, to 

 indicate that they come from the Latin tempus, corpus, testa, honestus" 

 As M. Meyer asks, " What value can be given to a spelling founded on 

 such fluctuating principles ? " And he quotes Gaston Paris as saying 

 that " the academy, deceived by superficial data, thought it was fur- 

 thering scientific accuracy by adopting traditional spelling; in reality 

 they followed routine and added to confusion." M. Meyer declares 

 that " what should have been done, had the academy understood its 

 mission, would have been to follow methodically the path taken, in- 

 stinctively and without purpose, by the writers of the middle ages ; 

 a gradual modification of the system of representing sounds was neces- 



