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Sunday, April 08, 2012

Department of Bad Ideas: Old-New Spelling

Following up on a long-ago post about Noah Webster's orthographical reform efforts, here is something to be filed under "good ideas that never took off":
The principal alterations, necessary to render our orthography sufficiently regular and easy, are these:
1. The omission of all superfluous or silent letters; as in bread. Thus bread, head, give, breast, built, meant, realm, friend, would be spelt, bred, hed, giv, brest, bilt, ment, relm, frend. Would this alteration produce any inconvenience, any embarrassment or expense? By no means. On the other hand, it would lessen the trouble of writing, and much more, of learning the language; it would reduce the true pronunciation to a certainty; and while it would assist foreigners and our own children in acquiring the language, it would render the pronunciation uniform, in different parts of the country, and almost prevent the possibility of changes.
2. A substitution of a character that has a certain definite sound, for one that is more vague and indeterminate. Thus by putting ee instead of ea or ie, the words mean, near, speak grieve, zeal, would become meen, neer, speek, greev, zeel. This alteration could not occasion a moments trouble; at the same time it would prevent a doubt respecting the pronunciation; whereas the ea and ie having different sounds, may give a learner much difficulty. Thus greef should be substituted for griefkee for keybeleev for believelaf for laughdawter for daughterplow for plough; tuf for tough; proov for proveblud for blood; and draft for draught. In this manner ch in Greek derivatives, should be changed into k; for the English ch has a soft sound, as in cherish; but k always a hard sound. Therefore character, chorus, cholic, architecture, should be written karacter, korus, kolic, arkitecture; and were they thus written, no person could mistake their true pronunciation.
3. Thus ch in French derivatives should be changed into shmachine, chaise, chevalier, should be written masheen, shaze, shevaleer; and pique, tour, oblique, should be written peek, toor, obleek.
4. A trifling alteration in a character, or the addition of a point would distinguish different sounds, without the substitution of a new character. Thus a very small stroke across th would distinguish its two sounds. A point over a vowel, in this manner, aor รป, or might answer all the purposes of different letters. And for the dipthong ow, let the two letters be united by a small stroke, or both engraven on the same piece of metal, with the left hand line of the w united to the o.
Peepl! Just imajin hou [imagine the proposed "ow" dipthong letter here] much eezier skool wud bee nou if wee had onlee folloued Webster's adviz. Wee cud rit lik this all the tim and never hav to lern fonix or probablee even hol langwaj. I am at leest convinced that this wud produs soshul yunitee and level class distinkshuns much mor quicklee than our obnoxushlee hibridized Breetish spelling did, aren't yu?

4 comments:

Jacob T. Levy said...

He was a lolcatz caption writer ahead of his time.

Sigivald said...

I was just this morning reading Chesterton's comment on this very sort of thing.

Chesterton - not surprisingly - rejects it.

I think his reasoning is correct; the complexities are meaningful in enough cases that we'd lose significant information by such a reform.

Miss Self-Important said...

JTL: I can only imagine that to be compared to lolcat would be Webster's worst nightmare.

Sigivald: But the whole thing is explicitly political--the point seems not to be what is good for our historical understanding or connectedness (with, in this case, English culture), but how we can best differentiate ourselves from these origins and simultaneously unify ourselves internally. Writing like lolcats is certainly different.

Sigivald said...

I suppose.

Mostly, though, I don't see that those notional gains as worth even half the cost.

(Even if I thought it would have worked, which I don't.)