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PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



have been chosen with great care, and after very numerous experi- 

 ments. The present form of the phonetic alphabet being as high as 

 the seventeenth of those which have been successively proposed. 

 The proposed alphabet is the following : — 



" Some objections which are made to the project of reform ought to 

 be considered. 



"1. It is feared by many that if the new mode of printing should 

 prevail, all the libraries now in existence will become useless. This 

 fear is entirely groundless. When a knowledge of the language, or 

 facihty in reading, is once acquired through phonotypy, it will be per- 

 fectly easy to read books printed in the common type ; far more easy 

 than it is for us to read old black-letter English, or the English of the 

 times of Chaucer. It will probably take less time, — I have no doubt 

 myself that it will take much less time, — to read phonotypically first 

 and heterotypically afterwards, than to learn to read by the common 

 mode alone ; inasmuch as, when one has learnt the phonotypic alphabet, 

 he may learn to read of himself without farther assistance, the letters 

 giving necessarily the true sounds of the words, and, the knowledge of 

 the words of the language once acquired, one may, afterwards, soon 

 read them with ease, however disguised by a barbarous heterography. 



"2. It is objected that it will, if adopted, oblige all of us to learn a 



