A NOTE ON SPELLING. 



BY HENRY h. BROOMALL. 



The Latin alphabet had no letter IT. The letter J' was 

 used to represent the vowel sound u (oo as in brood) and also 

 the consonant sound re. It is said that in the first century 

 after Christ the Roman Emperor Claudius, recognizing the 

 need of a distinct letter for this «' sound, devised the form J, 

 an inverted digamma, and ordered its use. The new letter 

 thus had both rational and imperial backing. It appears on a 

 very few monumental remains of the period — and that was 

 the last of it. 



Nevertheless the difficulty brought about its own solution 

 in due time in a way quite irrational and democratic. As the 

 practice of writing without lifting the pen until a word is 

 completed tends to round the angles of the letters, the eye 

 grew accustomed to both the forms V and f^ for the same 

 letter. Of these two forms I ' was oftener maintained at the 

 beginning of a word because there it was not subject to the 

 curving swing of the pen which a preceding joined letter 

 would have produced. Moreover the f ' or I ' had the 7V sound 

 oftener at the beginning of a word, because such a sound 

 usually resulted from the combination of n before a vowel, 

 just as the French oui seems to English cars the exact pho- 

 netic equivalent of 7('^'. Hence there occurred an adjustment 

 under these two conditions by which the form \' became gen- 

 erally associated with the 7.' sound and the form f^ with the 

 original vowel soiiud. There was thus evolved a new letter 

 l\ and this with the old letter /' appropriated respectively 

 the two sounds whose imperfect representation troubled Clau- 

 dius some centuries before. 



Some things are beyond remedy liy imperialistic fiat, but 

 the old Emperor did not know it. There are modern instances. 



Human things never stay fixed. Letter and sound again 

 lost precise correspondence. I ', owing to phonetic changes 

 and new sounds in the languages usiny the letter, became 



