ANALYTIC ORTHOGRAPHY. 269 
and settled orthography [pronunciation?] in our language, when therefore every body was 
more or less a phonographer, seeking to write down the word as it sounded to him, for” 
like the Hebrews, Hindoos, Greeks, Latins, Welsh, and Cherokees, “he had no other law 
to guide him, the variations of spelling were infinite. [*} Take for instance the word sud- 
den; which does not seem to promise any great scope for variety.” 
37. Certainly not, if we spell all the variations of swbdan (with silent 6 as in sub—+) to 
suit the Latin SUBrTANeEvs, or conform them to the French soudain,-e. He proceeds to 
cite fourteen spellings, asswming that they represented the modern word, and not the lost 
forms from which our sudden is derived. Double forms like soden and suddain, perhaps 
of different age and locality, may (apart from the blunder of the double d) have been as 
correct formerly as are now urban and urbane; human and humane; travail and travel; 
costume and custom; clarify, glory, glare, glair, and clear; emmet and ant; decking and 
ticking; or brest of Wiclif, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the lettered vulgar, beside breast of 
these who know not the use of letters, according to Prisc*ian’s definition. 
38. Granting that these fourteen spellings stood for the same vocable, having the vowel 
up in the first, and of end in the second syllable, these sounds were unprovided with spe- 
cial characters, so that sud- might be spelt sod-, with o in worth, or sodd-, sudd-, some writing 
dd to shorten the vowel, as we spell add sad, will wilful. Thus, sodain may have had 
the vowels of worth and said; sodaine— 
Jelous in honor sodaine and quicke in quarrell.—As you like it, 1623. 
the ¢ of imagine(-ation;) sodan the vowel of many; sodayne that of says, (sayd;) sodein -e 
that of heifer; sodeyn that of they pure, or modified as in its derivative them, as silent 6 
turns break into wreck. Other forms would have been justified by friend, jeopardy, dead, 
fetid, guess, panegyric, (Hlis, Plea 2d Kd., p. 155,) English being more irregular here 
than old English, with the difference, that the moderns corrupt a wider field with their 
irregularities. Abner Kneeland thus answers the foregoing objection.t 
* As in the variations of the Latin word puo, which have been spelt as in fwo, twice, twain, twelve, duodeci- 
mo, dodecahedron, dual, deuce, double, doubt, tub, diander, bisect, balance :—or of GENTILIS—genteel, gentil- 
ity, gentile, gentle, jaunty; of which the first, as the oldest and nearest the original, should have had a more ety_ 
mologic orthography, whilst the last should not have been spelt with jand y. So Greek varies, as in 74yvo¢, OVVOS, 
7tv0E, ytvoc, Uvvos, tvvoc, tvvdc, a hinny (ginnet, jennet.) 
+ Here the writer consults Ogilvie’s Imperial Dictionary to be assured that there is a word subtil, suggested by 
Hrench and Latin, but he finds only swbtle and subtile. The form attendance caused the third word of this es. 
say to be misspelt tendancy, and gauge (§ 7) was spelt ‘guage’ through ignorance of the conventional form. In 
another place the writer has spelt privitive as ‘ privative.’ 
ft A specimen of the American Pronouncing Spelling Book, &. Philadelphia, 1824. Printed partly in a 
phonetic alphabet. 
