792. ‘on orthography. 17$ 
~sounds of these characters,_according to the pronouns 
-cidtion of the words in which he found them used, 
and so would the orthography remain unaltered, if 
the language did not undergo any change. 
But, from what 1 have animadvertéd to above, 
the language being continually changing, some words 
come to have a sound perfectly different from others, 
in which the same characters are used, and which 
were originally pronounced alike ; for example,—lve 
an adjective, and ive a verb, are pronounced very 
differently, though the same characters are used in 
both ; and who knows whether ner were tn eet 
articulated alike or net ? 
The attentive reader may see from what: I have 
said that where one begins to alter the spelling, in 
order to accommodate it to the words, he enters on 
an endlefs thread of innovation. He would, in the 
quoted example, have a new. vowel for one of the 
words, a8 Struck his fancy: Perhaps he would have 
written /yve animals ; and no one knows that I dive 
may not, in the course of a century, be pronounced 
TI lave, and of course, provided these vowels re- 
tain, in the notion of the public at large, the same 
sound as at present they do, were the altering system 
adopted, would be so written. 
I need not animadvert on the numberlefs evil con- 
sequences that would attend such a practice, as that of 
mutilating the spelling of words, as the fancy of the 
public thould suggest to be agreeable to the pronoun~ 
ciation. Every language would be the language of 
day ; our Thomson, our Milton, our Shakespeare, 
would in a hundred years be unintelligible ; and to 
preserve our laws and our records from eternal ob- 
