Orthography

“ Orthography is less essential to language than orthoepy; since all languages are spoken, whilst but a few languages are written. Orthography presupposes orthoepy. Orthography addresses itself to the eye, orthoepy to the ear. Orthoepy deals with the articulate sounds that constitute syllables and words; orthography treats of the signs by which such articulate sounds are expressed in writing. A letter is the sign of an articulate (and, in the case of h, of an inarticulate) sound.
§ 143. A full and perfect system of orthography consists in two things:—1. ”

“ To make this part of the work as complete as [Pg viii] possible, great care has been used to render the orthography correct: published specimens of the Dialect have been consulted, as well as living authorities, and no pains have been spared that could contribute to make it complete both to the eye and to the ear. A difference of orthography may occasionally appear, caused by the necessity of making a rhyme;—excepting a few rare instances of this kind, a standard has been adopted which has not been departed from. ”

“ Despite the weakness of the argument for our orthography as preserving the historical origins of words, it remains as the most potent, because the most sentimental obstacle to reform, unless it be that blind subservience to routine, that love of the unchanged thing for its own sake alone. Be this as it may, our English orthography will gradually, and in time, conform more and more to phonetic principles. But for the practical needs of the non-English, the interest of the language as a world speech, the movement is fairly glacial in its slowness, and the world will not wait. ”

“ Where there is no traditional orthography, as when Old English (Anglo-Saxon) was first written down in Latin letters, spelling was necessarily phonetic; but where there is a large literature and a class of professional scribes, the influence of the traditional orthography becomes stronger, till at last the invention of printing and the diffusion of one standard dialect over a large area occupied originally by a variety of other dialects make changes of spelling as inconvenient as they were once easy and natural. ”

“ Orthography is vitiated among such as learn first to speak, and then to write, by imperfect notions of the relation between letters and vocal utterance; but to those students every character is of equal importance; for letters are to them not symbols of names, but of things; when they write they do not represent a sound, but delineate a form. ”

“ In some departments of orthography the evidence is so unsatisfactory that the rejected spellings are but little less probable than those adopted; and thus they should in strictness be accounted alternative readings. But to have printed them in the margin along with the substantive alternatives would have crowded and confused the pages of our text beyond measure, without any corresponding gain. They are therefore reserved for the Appendix, in which a few additional remarks on some special points of orthography, especially on some forms of proper names, may fitly find a place. ”

“ The peculiar orthography employed is, however, evidently not the mere attempt of a person ignorant of the [viii] proper orthography to write the words in English letters in an arbitrary manner, so as to present, as nearly as possible, the sound of the words as they struck his ear when repeated to him, but bears evident marks of having been a regular and known system of orthography, which, although we have few specimens of it left, may not the less have once prevailed in that part of the Highlands more removed from the influence of Irish teaching. ”

“ There are some classes of words of which this true; but let it be noted that no small part of the anomalies in the spelling of words, are egregious corruptions of the primitive orthography. Thus the present orthography of leather, feather, weather, stead, wealth, mould, son, ton, wonder, worship, thirst, &c. is corrupt; having been vitiated during the dark ages of English literature, under the Norman princes. The true orthography from the first Saxon writings to the 12th century, was lether, fether, wether, sted or stede, welga, mold, suna, tunna, wundor, wurthscipe, thurst. ”

“ The word is a derived word; it is transplanted into our own language from the Latin, where it is spelt with a c (civitas) ; and to change this c into s conceals the origin and history of the word. For this reason the c is retained, although, as far as the mere expression of sounds (the primary object in orthography) is concerned, the letter is a superfluity. In cases like the one adduced the orthography is bent to a secondary end, and is traversed by the etymology. ”

“ In response to this demand, and in order to facilitate the labor of the compositor and reader, a conventional mode of spelling was adopted and put into general use by the printers. Thus English orthography was taken from the direct control of the intellectual class who wrote books, and was turned over to a mechanical class who simply printed books. The intellectual class strove to make the spelling of our tongue conform to the pronunciation. With this object always in view English orthography was permitted a wide variation. ”

“ The consequence of those efforts in contrary directions is that French orthography is now quite as traditional and unphonetic as English, and gives an even falser notion than this of the actual state of the language it is supposed to represent. Many of the features of Old French orthography, early and late, are preserved in English orthography; to it we owe the use of c for s (Old English c = k only) , of j (i) for dzh, of v (u) for v (in Old English written f) , and probably of ch for tsh. The English w is purely French, the Old English letter being the runic þ. ”

“ The sound of o when long is in orthography represented by o, which letter when representing a long vowel generally denotes this sound; Ex.: stor large, Blod blood, god good, Sko shoe, Bro bridge (as for o with sound of long å see § 19) .
22. The short sound of o is represented in orthography by o in the following cases: 1) in words formed by inflection, derivation or composition from a root word or form with long o; Ex.: nordisk Northern (from nor (d) , Gods goods (from god good) , (but godt neuter of god, pron. gåt) ”

“ The Orthographia does not by any means limit its observations to spelling; there are also rules for pronunciation, a subject which in later times naturally held a very important place in French grammars written for the use of Englishmen, while orthography became one of the chief concerns of French grammarians. That orthography received so much attention at this early period in this country, is explained by the fact that these manuals were partly intended for "clerks," who would frequently have to write in French. ”

“ The orthography of printed matter necessarily reacts upon the orthography of the men who are familiar with it. These, when they come to write, will be apt to repeat the errors they have learned from the books they read. ”

“ It will be seen in the table, that the orthography of some words is changed, as they are declined through the different tones. In rapid speaking, words in the third and seventh tones are but slightly distinguishable from the first tone; and in such cases the orthography reverts toward the form of the corresponding word in the first tone. Yet when spoken deliberately, the tones are readily distinguished, and the orthography varies with the tones, as shown in the table.
Nouns. Nouns, like other Chinese words, are incapable of inflexion. ”

“ Others, less absurdly indeed, but with equal unlikelihood of success, have endeavoured to proportion the number of letters to that of sounds, that every sound may have its own character, and every character a single sound. Such would be the orthography of a new language to be formed by a synod of grammarians upon principles of science. But who can hope to prevail on nations to change their practice, and make all their old books useless? or what advantage would a new orthography procure equivalent to the confusion and perplexity of such an alteration?"--Johnson's Grammar before Quarto Dict., p. ”

“ The German orthography is comparatively phonetic: it has hardly any silent letters, and it generally has one symbol for each sound, each symbol having only one value, the exceptions falling under a few simple rules, which are easily remembered. There are other languages which have still more phonetic orthographies, such as Spanish, Welsh and Finnish. But even the best of them are not perfect: even when they are not actually misleading, they are always inadequate. On the other hand, no system of writing is wholly unphonetic. ”

“ It must be confessed that Orm often forgets his own rules of spelling, and although hundreds of oversights are corrected by interlineation, many inconsistencies still remain. Nevertheless, the orthography of the Ormulum is the most valuable existing source of information on the development of sounds in Middle English. ”

“ The orthography in the first column of the Worcester List “is deemed to be well authorized, and in most cases preferable; but with respect to the authority of that in the right-hand column, there is a great diversity. Both orthographies of some of the words are right, the words being differently spelled when used in different senses” ”

“ Simplicity in the orthography of a language is not less important than desirable. And, as the vowels in Derbalese are not much varied, each having seldom more than two distinct sounds, which must be invariably governed by accentuation, I have disencumbered the language as much as possible of consonants. ”

“ But, after all, efforts to bring about in this way accord between form and [Pg 265] sound can affect only a very limited class of words. The gap between orthography and orthoepy is, with us, too wide and impassable for the latter ever to close up. The most we can do is in process of time to revive the pronunciation of a few letters that are now silent, or to substitute a few forms etymologically correct for the corruptions by which they have been supplanted. ”

“ There are, moreover, [233] cases in which there is no indication in writing of single sounds, and even syllables, which are actually pronounced; and there is at least one case of a word being written as if it began with a vowel, while it really begins with a consonant.
One of the chief reasons for this state of affairs is the attempt which has been made to represent an exceedingly numerous and varied series of sounds with a meagre alphabet of eighteen letters. The system of orthography developed, though highly ingenious, has proved entirely inadequate to its purpose. ”

“ The attention of the men of our race has been more than distracted from any consideration of the subject by the character of our orthography. Their minds have been thrown into a state of bewilderment. As a single illustration, take the representation of the sound usually termed “long i.” This third so-called vowel of our alphabet is not really a vowel, but a diphthong. Its sound is most commonly represented by the single letter itself, seen, for instance, in such a word as mind. ”

“ The evil effects wrought on the orthography by printing, as contrasted with the previous method of manuscript reproduction, were largely due to the difference of conditions under [Pg 273] which the two arts were carried on. The early type-setters, indeed, had to encounter the same difficulties which beset the copyists of manuscripts. There were among educated men the widest diversities of pronunciation. No established literary, still less established orthoepic standard, to which all felt obliged to conform, could possibly grow up during the long civil strife of the fifteenth century. ”

“ If a nation gradually builds up its alphabet and gradually alters it, and if this process is not impeded or interrupted by any historical events, the literary language and the orthography will then contain many elements which do not truly correspond to the sounds of the language as it is spoken at that moment. ”

“ Nay, many people, even of education and fashion, never attempt to write a letter without frequently consulting a dictionary. But with the proposed orthography, a child would learn to spell, without trouble, in a very short time, and the orthography being very regular, he would ever after find it difficult to make a mistake. ”

“ Assuming the argument to hold universally then, we assert it to be worthless, because of the very limited number to whom it could apply; but we utterly and entirely deny its universality; nay, we deny, in toto, that the present heterography of the English language is sufficient to lead us to its etymology, and that, if a phonetical orthography were substituted, the etymology would be obscured. ”

“ Our orthography is, of course, an evolution. It began with picture symbols, and some of these were gradually changed into the letters of our alphabet. But the signs have always been later than the sounds, and we never had enough of the former to express the niceties of the latter. Therefore imperfections and inconsistencies in any new system proposed should not be fatal against it, if it is enough of an advance on the existing system, and a better advance than any other proposed. ”

“ The primal cause of the chaotic condition of English orthography, is the fact that the Roman alphabet, which was a perfect phonography of the old Latin language, lacked characters for four English vowels and four English consonants. ”

“ In the work before us, the nautical import of the terms is duly considered, and the orthography, as far as feasible, is ruled by authority and custom, with an occasional slight glance at the probable etymology of the words—slight, because derivation is a seductive and frequently illusory pilot. ”