34 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



a lad or servant, and the other an under ploughman or the inhabitant 

 of a village. It is from present usage only the meaning of words is 

 to be determined.' To this answer may be added, that phonography 

 will probably accompany phonotypy, and that when words from differ- 

 ent languages are written, side by side, in the letters of an alphabet of 

 signs formed on philosophical principles, as those of phonography are, 

 a multitude of derivations will reappear which had been long buried 

 out of sight under the barbarous and fantastic ruins of exploded hete- 

 rographical spellings.* 



" 4. A fourth objection may be stated, with its answer, in the words 

 of Dr. Franklin. ' Your second inconvenience is, " that the distinction 

 between words of different meaning and similar sound would bo destroy- 

 ed." That distinction is already destroyed in pronouncing them ; and 

 we rely on the sense alone of the sentence to ascertain which of the 

 several words, similar in sound, we intend. If this is sufficient in the 

 rapidity of discourse, it will be much more so in written sentences, 

 which may be read leisurely, and attended to more particularly, in case 

 of difficulty, than we can attend to a past sentence, while the speaker 

 is hurrying us along with new ones.' 



" The existing forms of letters have been retained to represent those 

 sounds which they are found, after an extended numerical analysis, to 

 stand for most frequently in the present alphabet. This fact renders 

 the change in the appearance of phonotypical printing as small as pos- 

 sible, and the difficulty of reading it the least possible ; so that any 

 person accustomed to read our language as now printed may at once 

 read phonotypical printing without difficulty, and in an hour or two 

 read it fluently. The advantages following from the adoption of this 

 reformed alphabet will be very great. 



"1. It may be acquired in one fifteenth part of the time necessary 

 for the present.t 



" 2. When acquired, it leads the learner to the correct pronuncia- 

 tion of every word which he meets with. 



* This fact, very strikingly proved by writing phonographically words in dif- 

 ferent languages from the same root, gives satisfactory evidence of the truth of a 

 principle admitted by Archdeacon Hare: — "The common pronunciation of a 

 word frequently agrees better than its spelling with its etymology and analogy." 



t A writer in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal says one twentieth the time. A 

 child has now, instead of the mere alphabet, to learn nearly all the words of the 

 language, as if they were represented by separate hieroglyphics. 



