SCIENTIFIC SPELLING 



I.— By SIR HARRY JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.Sc. 



The Editor of this review has asked me, who have just published 

 a work on Phonetic Spelling through the Cambridge University 

 Press, to write on the subject of ' Scientific Spelling ' in the 

 pages of this quarterly. 



In some ways I prefer the Editor's suggested title to that 

 which covers my book, for any change of a radical nature which 

 we may attempt to make in the orthography of English or any 

 other well-established tongue should be scientific as well as 

 what may be called phonetic ; that is to say, that as nearly 

 as possible we should interpret the utterances of the human 

 voice with scientific exactitude, classifying the sounds — vowel 

 and consonant — in relation to the parts of the mouth and throat 

 which utter them. 



Phonetic or scientific spelling must be logical. All sounds 

 which we describe as single because it is exceedingly difficult, 

 if not impossible, to split them up into component utterances, 

 must be represented by distinct single letters, and compound 

 sounds be expressed by the letter symbols of their component 

 parts, only a very few exceptions being made in cases where 

 the compound sounds are so nearly fused that division becomes 

 an act of preciosity, or where the construction is so common 

 and so frequently uttered that it should be given one simple and 

 easily formed symbol. A case in point is the sound of o in 

 'bone' and 'mow.' This in most reasonable phonetic systems 

 is represented by the Greek letter &>, whether or not this was 

 the value of the omega. In reality it is a fusion of the separate 

 vowel sounds of 6 and it. Similarly, in the scientific alphabet 

 I propose, and in the majority of those already adopted by 

 scientific men abroad, the letter c stands for the English ch in 

 'church' or the Italian c in 'cielo' or ' cera,' and j likewise has 

 its English value, instead of being used as the consonantal i (y). 

 Logically, it would be more correct to express c by tsh (if one 

 used the orthography of the India Office or Royal Geographical 



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