308 



fAprll 5, 



And again, says Dr. March, " Caxton brought over a force of Dutch 

 printers, who set up manuscripts as best they could, with many an objur- 

 gation. People ceast, at last, to feel any necessity for keeping sounds and 

 signs together. The written words have come to be associated with the 

 spoken words as wholes without reference to the sounds which the sepa- 

 rate letters would indicate. Changes in the sounds go on without record 

 in the writing. Ingenious etymologists slip in new silent letters as records 

 of history drawn from their imagination. Old monsters propagate them 

 selves in the congenial environment, and altogether we have attained the 

 worst spelling on the planet. And we have been proud of it, and we arc 

 fond of it." 



The actual condition of things, then, as IMeiklejohn (late Asst. Commis- 

 sioner of the Endowed School Commission for iScolland) puts it, is : Out 

 of the 26 letters, only 8 are true, fixt and permanent qualities — that is, are 

 true both to eye and ear. There are 38 distinct sounds (Sayce recognizes 

 40, others 33) in our spoken language; and there are about 400 distinct sym- 

 bols (simple and compound) to represent these 38 sounds. In other 

 words, there are 400 servants to do the work of 38. Of the 26 letters, 15 

 have acquired a habit of hiding themselves. They are written and printed, 

 but the ear has no account of them ; such are w in wrong and gh in right. 

 The vowel sounds are printed in different ways ; a long o, for example, 

 has 13 printed symbols to represent it. And Isaac Pitman shows that in 

 ov;r magnificent tongue, with its wretched orlhografy, the long vowel 

 a (in father) is represented in 5 diiferent ways "; tlie a (in gate) in 17 ways ; 

 the e has 21 ditferent spellings ; the oa (in broad) is represented bj' 9 dif- 

 ferent combinations of letters; the vowel o has 19 modes of representa- 

 tion, and the vowel " oo" (in smooth) has 21*. Mr. Ellis gives a list 

 of 97 signs and combinations to express vowel sounds, and having, in all, 

 319 meanings, or a little more than an average of three meanings to each 

 sign or combination ; and, further, he shows that 34 consonant signs have 

 79 uses. 



As a consequence of all this (and more, if we were to stop to discuss it), 

 an enthusiastic fonetist has calculated that the word scissors can be cor- 

 rectly spelt in 596,580 diiferent ways, when it ought to be possible to spell 

 it in but one, and that one obvious to a child or a foreigner who has never 

 seen it in print nor heard it spelt. In brief, we have, says Prof. Whitney, 

 " a greater discordance between the written and the spoken speech among 

 us than in any other community of equal enlightenment. This is the 

 whole truth ; and any attempt to make it appear otherwise savors only of 

 the wisdom of the noted fox who lost his brush in a trap, and wanted to 

 persuade himself and the world that the curtailment was a benefit and a 

 decoration. Every departure from the rule that writing is the handmaid 

 of speech is a dereliction of principle, and an abandonment of advantages 

 which seemed to have been long ago assured to us, by the protracted 



* Authorities differ somewhat in these figures. Dr. Thomas Hill places the number of 

 symbols for long a (in gate) as high as thirty. 



