38 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A QUESTION OF PREFERENCE IN ENGLISH SPELLING. 



By Dr. EDWIN W. BOWEN, 



RANDOLPH-MACON COLLEGE. 



TTTE little think when we read or write that the words we employ 

 * * are not precisely the same as those which have been in use in 

 our mother-tongue from time immemorial. We are born into the 

 language, so to say, and the words of our vocabulary we regard as part 

 and parcel of our rich heritage of American liberty. Yet even the 

 words of our English speech, like many of the institutions and cus- 

 toms of our Anglo-Saxon civilization, have a long history back of 

 them, showing traces here and there of the various stages of develop- 

 ment they have passed through. The words we use to-day are not 

 identical in form or meaning with those employed by our forebears 

 of the generation of Chaucer or even of the generation of Shakespeare. 

 The forms of our English words have undergone considerable change 

 since that remote period in the development of our mother-tongue. 

 English spelling is far different from what it was in Alfred's, or 

 Chaucer's time. 



Before the invention of printing, those who spoke and wrote the 

 English language seem to have been at liberty to spell as they chose. 

 Their mental composure was not disturbed by the annoying suspicion 

 that their spelling was not according to the norm prescribed by the 

 dictionary. In those good old days there was no acknowledged cri- 

 terion such as the 'Century,' or 'Webster,' or 'Worcester'; and writers 

 had no final appeal in the matter of orthography as present-day writers 

 have. Since there was no standard authority on orthography to which 

 all polite society had to conform, the authors of the thirteenth and 

 fourteenth centuries were untrammeled by tradition and were free to 

 spell as they pleased. Every writer was a law unto himself and fol- 

 lowed the dictates of his own orthographical conscience, with no dic- 

 tionary to molest or make him afraid. We find an allusion to this 

 delightful sense of freedom in the comment which a well-known Amer- 

 ican humorist made upon Chaucer, that well of English undefiled from 

 which so many modern writers have drunk copious draughts of inspira- 

 tion. 'Chaucer,' said he quaintly, 'may have been a fine poet, but he 

 was a poor speller.' 



The diffusion of the art of printing and the consequent necessity 

 for a uniform orthography gradually curtailed this liberty, and then 

 the day of the dictionary dawned. The dictionary is a democratic 



