Parts of Speech: Essays on English

In a communication to a London review Professor W. W. Skeat remarked that “it is notorious that all the leading philologists of Europe, during the last quarter of a century, have unanimously condemned the present chaotic spelling of the English language, and have received on the part of the public generally, and of the most blatant and ignorant among the self-constituted critics, nothing but abusive ridicule, which is meant to be scathing, but is harmless from its silliness”; and it cannot be denied that the orthographic simplifications which the leading philologists of Great Britain and the United States are advocating have not yet been widely adopted. In an aggressive article an American essayist has sought to explain this by the assertion that phonetic-reform “is hopelessly, unspeakably, sickeningly vulgar; and this is an eternal reason why men and women of taste, refinement, and discrimination will reject it with a shudder of disgust.” Satisfactory as this explanation may seem to the essayist, I have a certain difficulty in accepting it myself, since I find on the list of the vice-presidents of the Orthographic Union the names of Mr. Howells, of Colonel Higginson, of Dr. Eggleston, of Professor Lounsbury, and of President White; and even if I was willing to admit that these gentlemen were all of them lacking in taste, refinement, and discrimination, I still could not agree with the aggressive essayist so long as my own name was on the same list.

What strikes me as a better explanation is that given by the president of the Orthographic Union, Mr. Benjamin E. Smith, who has suggested that phonetic-reformers have asked too much, and so have received too little; they have demanded an immediate and radical change, and as a result they have frightened away all but the most resolute radicals; they have failed to reckon with the immense conservatism which gives stability to all the institutions of the English-speaking race. As Mr. Smith puts it, “there is a deep-rooted feeling that the existing printed form is not only a symbol but the most fitting symbol for our mother-tongue, and that a radical change must impair for us the beauty and spiritual effectiveness of that which it symbolizes.”

A part of the unreadiness of the public to listen to the advocates of phonetic-reform has been due also to the general consciousness that pronunciation is not fixed but very variable indeed, being absolutely alike in no two places where English is spoken, and perhaps in no two persons who speak English. The humorous poet has shown to us how the little word vase once served as a shibboleth to reveal the homes of each of the four young ladies who came severally from New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Kalamazoo. The difference between the pronunciation of New York and Boston is not so marked as that between London and Edinburgh—or as that between New York and London. And the pronunciation of to-day is not that of to-morrow; it is constantly being modified, sometimes by imperceptible degrees and sometimes by a sudden change like the arbitrary substitution of aither and naither for eether and neether. Now, if pronunciation is not uniform in any two persons, in any two places, at any two periods, the wayfaring man is not to blame if he is in doubt, first, as to the possibility of a uniform phonetic spelling, and, second, as to its permanence even if it was once to be attained.

A glance down the history of English orthography discloses the fact that, however chaotic our spelling may seem to be now or may seem to have been in Shakspere’s day, it is and it always has been striving ineffectively to be phonetic. Always the attempt has been to use the letters of the word to represent its sounds. From the beginning there has been an unceasing struggle to keep the orthography as phonetic as might be. This continuous striving toward exactness of sound-reproduction has never been radical or violent; it has always been halting and half-hearted: but it has been constant, and it has accomplished marvels in the course of the centuries. The most that we can hope to do is to help along this good work, to hasten this inevitable but belated progress, to make the transitions as easy as possible, and to smooth the way so that the needful improvements may follow one another as swiftly as shall be possible. We must remember that a half-loaf is better than no bread; and we must remind ourselves frequently that the greatest statesmen have been opportunists, knowing what they wanted, but taking what they could get.

We have now to face the fact that in no language is a sudden and far-reaching reform in spelling ever likely to be attained; and in none is it less likely than in English. The history of the peoples who use our tongue on both sides of the Atlantic proves that they belong to a stock which is wont to make haste slowly, to take one step at a time, and never to allow itself to be overmastered by mere logic. By a series of gradations almost invisible the loose confederacy of 1776 developed into the firm union of 1861, which was glad to grant to Abraham Lincoln a power broader than that wielded by any dictator. Even the abolition of the corn-laws and the adoption of free-trade in Great Britain, sudden as it may seem, was only the final result of a long series of events.

The securing of an absolutely phonetic spelling being impracticable,—even if it was altogether desirable,—the efforts of those who are dissatisfied with the prevailing orthography of our language had best be directed toward the perfectly practical end of getting our improvement on the instalment plan. We must seek now to have only the most flagrant absurdities corrected. We must be satisfied to advance little by little. We must begin by showing that there is nothing sacrosanct about the present spelling either in Great Britain or in the United States. We must make it clear to all who are willing to listen—and it is our duty to be persuasive always and never dogmatic—that the effort of the English language to rid itself of orthographic anomalies is almost as old as the language itself. We must show those who insist on leaving the present spelling undisturbed that in taking this attitude they are setting themselves in opposition to the past, which they pretend to respect. The average man is open to conviction if you do not try to browbeat him into adopting your beliefs; and he can be induced to accept improvements, one at a time, if he has it made plain to him that each of these is but one in a series unrolling itself since Chaucer. We must convince the average man that we want merely to continue the good work of our forefathers, and that the real innovators are those who maintain the absolute inviolability of our present spelling.

Even the vehement essayist from whom I have quoted already, and who is the boldest of later opponents of phonetic-reform, is vehement chiefly against the various schemes of wholesale revision. He himself refuses to make any modification,—except to revert now and again to a medievalism like pædagogue,—but he knows the history of language too well not to be forced to admit that a simplification of some sort is certain to be achieved in the future. “The written forms of English words will change in time, as the language itself will change,” he confesses; “it will change in its vocabulary, in its idioms, in its pronunciation, and perhaps to some extent in its structural form. For change is the one essential and inevitable phenomenon of a living language, as it is of any living organism; and with these changes, slow and silent and unconscious, will come a change in the orthography.” As we read this admirable statement we cannot but wonder why a writer who understands so well the conditions of linguistic growth should wish to bind his own language in the cast-iron bonds of an outworn orthography. We may wonder also why he is not consistent in his own practice, and why he does not spell phænomenon as Macaulay did only threescore and ten years ago.

Underneath the American essayist’s objection to any orthographic simplification in English, and underneath the plaintive protests of certain British men of letters against “American spelling,” so called, lies the assumption that there is at the present moment a “regular” spelling, which has existed time out of mind and which the tasteless reformers wish to destroy. For this assumption there is no warrant whatever. The orthography of our language has never been stable; it has always been fluctuating; and no authority has ever been given to anybody to lay down laws for its regulation. For a convention to have validity it must have won general acceptance at some period; and the history of English shows that there has never been any such common agreement, expressed or implied, in regard to English spelling. Some of the unphonetic forms which are most vigorously defended, as hallowed by custom and by sentiment, are comparatively recent; and others which seem as sacred have had foisted into them needless letters conveying false impressions about their origins.

That there is no theory or practice of English orthography universally accepted to-day is obvious to all who may take the trouble to observe for themselves. The spelling adopted by the ‘Century Magazine’ is different from that to be found in ‘Harper’s Magazine’; and this differs again from that insisted upon in the pages of the ‘Bookman.’ The ‘Century’ has gone a little in advance of American spelling generally, as seen in ‘Harper’s,’ and the ‘Bookman’ is intentionally reactionary. In the United States orthography is in a healthier state of instability than it is in Great Britain, where there is a closer approximation to a deadening uniformity; but even in London and Edinburgh those who are on the watch can discover many a divergence from the strict letter of the doctrine of orthographic rigidity.

And just as there is no system of English spelling tacitly agreed on by all men of education using the English language at present, so there was also no system of English spelling consistently and continually used by our ancestors in the past. The orthography of Matthew Arnold differs a little, altho not much, from the orthography of Macaulay; and that in turn a little from the orthography of Johnson. In like manner the spelling of Dryden is very different from the spelling of Spenser, and the spelling of Spenser is very different from the spelling of Chaucer. At no time in the long unrolling of English literature from Chaucer to Arnold has there been any agreement among those who used the language as to any precise way in which its words should be spelled or even as to any theory which should govern particular instances. The history of English orthography is a record still incomplete of incessant variation; and a study of it shows plainly how there have been changes in every generation, some of them logical and some of them arbitrary, some of them helpful simplifications, and some of them gross perversities.

Thus we see that those who defend any existing orthography, which they choose to regard as “regular” and outside of which they affect to behold only vulgar aberration, are setting themselves against the example left us by our forefathers. We see also that those of us who are striving to modify our spelling in moderation are doing exactly what has been done by every generation that preceded us. To repeat in other words what I have said already, there is not any system of English orthography which is supported by a universal convention to-day or which has any sanctity from its supposed antiquity.

The opponents of simplification have been greatly aided by the general acceptance of this assumption of theirs that the advocates of simplification wanted to remove ancient landmarks, to break with the past, to introduce endless innovations. The best part of their case will fall to the ground when it is generally understood that the orthography of our language has never been fixed for a decad at a time. And this understanding of the real facts of the situation is likely to be enlarged in the immediate future by the wide circulation of many recent reprints of the texts of the great authors of the past in the exact spelling of the original edition. So long as we were in the habit of seeing the works of Shakspere and Steele, of Scott, Thackeray, and Hawthorne, all in an orthography which, if not uniform exactly, did not vary widely, we were sorely tempted to say that the spelling which was good enough for them is good enough for us and for our children.

But when we have in our hands the works of those great writers as they were originally printed, and when we are forced to remark that they spell in no wise alike one to the other; and when we discover that such uniformity of orthography they may have seemed to have was due, not to any theory of the authors themselves, but merely to the practice of the modern printing-offices and proof-readers—when these things are brought home to us, any superstitious reverence bids fair to vanish which we may have had for the orthography we believed to be Shakspere’s and Steele’s and Scott’s and Thackeray’s and Hawthorne’s.

And one indirect result of this scholarly desire to get as near as may be to the masterpiece as the author himself presented it to the world, is that men of letters and lovers of literature—two classes hitherto strangely ignorant of the history of the English language and of the constant changes always going on in its vocabulary, in its syntax, and in its orthography—will at least have the chance to acquire information at first hand. Their resistance to simplification ought to become less irreconcilable when the men of letters, now its chief opponents, have discovered for themselves that there is not now and never has been any stable system of orthography. When they really grasp the fact that there has been no permanency in the past and that there is no uniformity in the present, perhaps they will show themselves less unwilling to take the next step forward. Just now they are rather like the Tories, who, as Aubrey de Vere declared, wanted to uninvent printing and to undiscover America.

The most powerful single influence in fixing the present absurd spelling of our language was undoubtedly Johnson’s Dictionary, published in the middle of the eighteenth century. We cannot but respect the solid learning of Dr. Johnson and his indomitable energy; but the making of an English dictionary was not the task for which his previous studies had preëminently fitted him. Probably he would have succeeded better with a Latin dictionary; and indeed there is something characteristically incongruous in the spectacle of the burly doctor’s spending his toil in compiling a list of the words in a language the use of which he held to be disgraceful in a friend’s epitaph. Johnson was, in fact, as unfit a person as could be found to record English orthography, a task calling for a science the existence of which he did not even suspect, and for a delicacy of perception he lacked absolutely. In all matters of taste he was an elephantine pachyderm; and there are only a few of his principles of criticism which are not now disestablished.

Any one whose reading is at all varied and who strays outside of books printed within the past quarter-century, can find abundant evidence of the former chaos of English orthography. In Moxon’s ‘Mechanic Exercises,’ published in 1683, for example, we read that “how well other Forrain languages are Corrected by the Author, we may perceive by the English that is Printed in Forrain Countries”; and this shows us that the phonetic form forrain is older than the unphonetic foreign. In the ‘Spectator’ (No. 510) Steele wrote landskip where we should now write landscape; in Addison’s criticism of ‘Paradise Lost,’ contributed to the same periodical, we find critick, heroick, and epick; and whether Steele or Addison held the pen, ribbons were then always ribands.

On the title-page of the first edition of ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ published in 1719, we are told that we can read within “an account of how he was at last strangely delivered by Pyrates.” Fielding, in the ‘Champion’ in 1740, tells us that “dinner soon follow’d, being a gammon of bacon and some chickens, with a most excellent apple-pye.” In the same essay Fielding wrote that “our friends exprest great pleasure at our drinking”; and in ‘Tom Jones’ he wrote profest for professed (as we should now spell it). Here we discover that the nineteenth century is sometimes more backward than the eighteenth, profest and exprest being the very spellings which many are now advocating. Fielding also wrote Salique where we should now write Salic, as Wotton had written Dorique for Doric in a letter to Milton; and here the advantage is with us. So it is also in our spelling of the italicized word in the playbill of the third night of Mr. Cooper’s engagement at the Charleston theater, Friday, April 18, 1796: “Smoaking in the Theatre Prohibited.”

Attention has already been called to Macaulay’s phænomenon (and to Professor Peck’s pædagogue). The abolition of the digraph has been a protracted enterprise not yet completed. In a translation of Schlegel’s ‘Lectures on Dramatic Literature,’ published in London early in the nineteenth century, I have found æra for era; and in the eighteenth century economics was œconomics. Esthetic has not yet quite expelled æsthetic, altho anesthetic seems now fairly established.

The Greek ph is also a stumbling-block. We write phantom on the one hand and fancy on the other, and either phantasy or fantasy; yet all these words are derived from the same Greek root. Probably phancy would seem as absurd to most of us as fantom. Yet fantasy has only recently begun to get the better of phantasy. The Italians are bolder than we are, for they have not hesitated to write filosofia and fotografia. To most of us fotografer, as we read it on a sign in Union Square, seems truly outlandish; and yet if our great-grandfathers were willing to accept fancy there is no logical reason why our great-grandchildren may not accept fotografy. There is no longer any logical basis for opposition on the ground of scholarship. Indeed, the scholarly opposition to these orthographic simplifications is not unlike the opposition in Germany to the adoption of the Roman alphabet by those who cling to the old Gothic letter on the ground that it is more German, altho it is in reality only a medieval corruption of the Roman letter. With those who speak German, as with those who speak English, the chief obstacle to the accomplishment of proposed improvements in writing the language is to be found in the general ignorance of its history—or perhaps rather in that conceited half-knowledge which is always more dangerous than modest ignorance.

To diffuse accurate information about the history of English orthography is the most pressing and immediate duty now before those of us who wish to see our spelling simplified. We must keep reminding those we wish to convince that we want their aid in helping along the movement which has in the past changed musique to music, riband to ribbon, phantasy to fantasy, æra to era, phænomenon to phenomenon, and which in the present is changing catalogue to catalog, æsthetic to esthetic, programme to program, technique to technic.

There never has been any “regular” spelling accepted by everybody, or any system of orthography sustained by universal convention. To assume that there is anything of the sort is adroitly to beg the very question at issue. There are always in English many words the spelling of which is not finally fixed; and these doubtful orthographies Professor Peck, for example, would decide in one way and Professor Skeat would decide in another. The most of Professor Peck’s decisions would result in conforming his spelling to that which obtains in the printing-office of the London Times, but in several cases he would exercise the right of private judgment, spelling pædagogue, for example, and Vergil. But if he chooses to exercise the right of private judgment, he is estopped from denying this right also to Professor Skeat; and the moment either of them sets up the personal equation as a guide, all pretense of an accepted system vanishes.

It is our duty also to draw attention to the fact that it is a wholesome thing that there is no accepted system and that the orthography of our language should be free to modify itself in the future as it has in the past. It is this absence of system which gives fluidity and flexibility and the faculty of adaptation to changing conditions. The Chief Justice of England, when he addressed the American Bar Association, recorded his protest against a cast-iron code in law as tending to hinder legal development; and our language, like our law, must beware lest it lose its power of conforming to the needs of our people as these may be unexpectedly developed. Just as the conservatism of the English-speaking stock makes it highly improbable that any sweeping change in our spelling will ever be made, so the enterprise of the English-speaking stock, its energy and its common sense, make it highly improbable that any system will long endure which cramps and confines and prevents progress and simplification.

Finally, we must all of us bend our energies to combating the notion that, as Mr. Smith has put it, “the existing printed form is not only a symbol but the most fitting symbol of our mother-tongue.” There is an almost superstitious veneration felt by most of us for the spellings we learnt at school; they seem to us sanctified by antiquity; and perhaps even an inquiry into the history of the language is not always enough to disestablish this reverence for false gods. Yet knowledge helps to free us from servitude to idols; and when we are told that the so-called “accepted spelling” has “dignity,” we may ask ourselves what dignity there can be in the spelling of harbour with an inserted u which is not pronounced, which has been thrust in comparatively recently, and which is etymologically misleading.

In his effective answer to Mr. Herbert Spencer’s argument against the metric system, President T. C. Mendenhall remarked that “ignorant prejudice” is not so dangerous an obstacle to human progress, nor as common, as what may be called “intelligent prejudice,” meaning thereby “an obstinate conservatism which makes people cling to what is or has been, merely because it is or has been, not being willing to take the trouble to do better, because already doing well, all the while knowing that doing better is not only the easier, but is more in harmony with existing conditions. Such conservatism is highly developed among English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic.” It is just such conservatism as this that those of us will have to overcome who wish to see our English orthography continue its lifelong efforts toward simplification.

To understand how unfortunate for the cause of progress it is when its leaders miscalculate the popular inertia and when they are therefore moved to demand more than seems reasonable to the people as a whole, we have only to consider the result of the joint action, in 1883, of the Philological Society of England and of the American Philological Association, in consequence of which certain rules were prepared to simplify our spelling. Here was a union of indisputable authorities in favor of an amended orthography; but unfortunately the changes suggested were both many and various. They were too various to please any but the most resolute radicals; and they were too many to be remembered readily by the great majority of every-day folk taking no particular interest in the subject. They included theater, honor, advertize, catalog; and had they not included anything else, or had they included only a very few similar simplifications, these spellings might have won acceptance in the past score of years, even in Great Britain; the same authorities would now be in a position to make a few further suggestions equally easy to remember, with a fair hope that these would establish themselves in turn.

Owing to this attempt to do too much all at once, the joint action of the two great philological organizations came to naught. Such effect as it had was indirect at best. It may have been the exciting cause of the so-called “Printers’ Rules,” which were approved and recommended by many of the leading typographers of the United States a few years later. These printers’ rules were few and obvious. They suggested catalog, program, epaulet, esthetic—all of which have become more familiar of late. They suggested further opposit, hypocrit, etc., and also fotograf, fonetic, etc.; and these simplifications have not yet been adopted widely enough to prevent the words thus emended from seeming a little strange to all those who had paid no special attention to the subject. And these uninterested outsiders are the very people who are to be converted. To them and to them only must all argument be addressed. We may rest assured that we have slight chance of bringing over to our side any of those who have actually enlisted against us. We must not count on desertions from the enemy; we must enroll the neutrals at every opportunity.

Probably the most important action yet taken in regard to our orthography was that of the National Educational Association in formally adopting for use in all its official publications twelve simplified spellings—program, tho, altho, thoro, thorofare, thru, thruout, catalog, prolog, decalog, demagog, pedagog. These simplified spellings were immediately adopted in the ‘Educational Review’ and in other periodicals edited by members of the association. They are very likely to appear with increasing frequency in the school-books which members may hereafter prepare; and any simplified spelling which once gets itself into a school-book is pretty sure to hold its own in the future. After an interval of ten or fifteen years the National Educational Association will be in a position to consider the situation again; and it may then decide that these twelve words have established themselves in their new form sufficiently widely and firmly to make it probable that the association could put forward another list of a dozen more simplified spellings with a reasonable certainty that those also will be accepted.

The United States government appointed a board to decide on a uniform orthography for geographical names; and the recommendations of this body were generally in the direction of increased simplicity—Bering Straits, for example. The spellings thus officially adopted by the national government were at once accepted by the chief publishers of school text-books. And these makers of school-books also follow the rules formulated by a committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science appointed to bring about uniformity in the spelling and pronunciation of chemical terms. Among the rules formulated by the committee and adopted by the association were two which dropped a terminal e from certain chemical terms entering into more general use. Thus the men of science now write oxid, iodid, chlorid, etc., and quinin, morphin, anilin, etc., altho the general public has not relinquished the earlier orthography, oxide and quinine. Even the word toxin, which came into being since the adoption of these rules by the associated scientists, is sometimes to be seen in newspapers as toxine.

Thus we see that there is progress all along the line; it may seem very slow, like that of a glacier, but it is as certain as it is irresistible. There is no call for any of us to be disheartened by the prospect. We may, indeed, each of us do what little we can severally toward hastening the result. We can form the habit of using in our daily writing such simplified spellings as will not seem affected or freakish, keeping ourselves always in the forefront of the movement, but never going very far in advance of the main body. We must not make a fad of orthographic amelioration, nor must we devote to it a disproportionate share of our activity—since we know that there are other reforms as pressing as this and even more important. But we can hold ourselves ready always to lend a hand to help along the cause; and we can show our willingness always to stand up and be counted in its favor.