SPELLING REFORM 267 



willing to assume the labor of learning it or to use what would not be a 

 practical means of communication. 



And so it is with spelling reform. Men have been free to spell in 

 any way that seemed best adapted to the reproduction of what they 

 wanted to convey. Variety in speech has been as natural as variety in 

 personal character, in dress or in amusement. Inconsistencies in fash- 

 ion will continue as long as men retain their personal liberty to select 

 idioms, words and spellings that suit the individual fancy of the user. 

 So long as a babel of different languages continues on earth will there 

 be a corresponding babel of spellings. There is no remedy but self- 

 interest. In making ourselves understood we are compelled to recog- 

 nize the conservation of energy. The man who writes a sentence must 

 consider not only his own thought-machine but also that of his reader. 

 Personal liberty to spell as a writer may find easiest or think best is 

 soon limited by the necessity to make himself easily intelligible. If his 

 spelling is very different from what has gradually become the fashion, 

 the blunderer is soon made aware that he is hard to understand, and 

 self j interest teaches him to avoid interposing obstacles between himself 

 and his constituency. 



The printing-press has been the great unifier in the establishment 

 of fashion in spelling. But such fashion is not in the least sacred. In the 

 spelling of the English language the fashion has been set for the most 

 part in the printing office by foremen, or by mere type-setters who were 

 entirely innocent of any hostile designs against orthography, etymology 

 or logic. Professor Lounsbury has shown that the type-setting of the 

 earlier books in our language was done mostly by printers who had 

 come to England from the continent. In the city of Strasburg may 

 be seen to-day a statue erected to the memory of Gutenberg, whose first 

 crude invention of type was long unknown in England. Type-setting 

 was initially and most naturally a German art, and it would have been 

 very remarkable if the conservative and self-satisfied Englishman had 

 been found ready to adopt promptly any art that had its origin outside 

 of England. The intruding German or Dutchman could not be ex- 

 pected to possess much English scholarship, and in the printing room 

 nobody could direct him because no directions for spelling existed even 

 among the authors themselves. The Anglo-Saxon language had grown 

 naturally and healthily. The English language was not then known 

 to have any separate existence or special individuality. It later received 

 a large infusion of Norman-French, and the thought of consistency, 

 of uniformity in spelling or in anything else, had not occurred to 

 anybody. Chaucer was limited by no orthographic conventions, and if 

 his spelling could be improved by the Dutch printer his readers prob- 

 ably recognized the possibility that there might be room for improve- 

 ment. It was not his fault if the improvement was confided to in- 

 competent hands. His spelling was more consistent than that of to-day. 



