Phonetic spelling

“ For anyone who knew the perfection of Martin’s rendering of the tones of West Galway, of the gestures, the pauses, that give the life of a story, the words lying dead on the page are only a pain. Perhaps, some day, portable and bindable phonography will be as much part of a book as its pictures are.
Phonetic spelling in matters of dialect is a delusive thing, to be used with the utmost restraint. It is superfluous for those who know, boring for those who do not. ”

“ For the scientific philologist, no less than for the practical teacher, a return to the phonetic spelling of our English language is of the highest importance. What the philologist wishes to know is not how words are spelt, but how they are pronounced, and this end can be obtained only by means of an alphabet in which all the chief sounds of the language are represented, and each character represents but one sound. ”

“ No project is entertained by any organized body to establish phonetic spelling. It can hardly be said to exist outside of dictionaries. These have to employ it or some approach to it in order to convey to the users of language a conception of the proper pronunciation which the form itself does not indicate. ”

“ No one, indeed, who comprehends what is required, in a language so lawless as ours, to bring about a perfect accordance between orthography and orthoepy, is ever likely to underrate the difficulties which stand in the way of the establishment of phonetic spelling, even were men as eager for its adoption as they are now hostile to it. ”

“ Phonetic spelling is indulged in occasionally—I should almost say humorously—were it not a Teuton mind which evolved the phonetic combinations which represent proper names not found in that dictionary—names like Holzminden and New York, for example.
"As for the symbols and numbers, they are not at all obscure.
Reference to the dictionary makes the cipher perfectly clear.
"In Stormonth's Dictionary you will notice that each page has two columns; each column a varying number of paragraphs; some of the paragraphs contain more than one word to be defined. ”

“ Most amazing caricature of a written language! ⸮And what is the result? No one spells correctly; many spell wretchedly; but no one is at all times certain of the proper mode of spelling any given word. For there is not even method in this madness. Words of precisely the same sound are spelt in the most different manners—words of different sounds are spelt in the same manner. Of these two cases, the following examples occur to us immediately. We give the phonetic representative of the sound, followed by =, and the heterotypic spellings ”

“ Their action evinced hardly higher intelligence than would have been shown by considering the word five as phonetically represented by the Arabic numeral 5, which in all languages conveys the same meaning, and in all languages has a different pronunciation. One characteristic there is which denotes most distinctly the infantile state of knowledge that still continues to prevail on the whole subject. By most men any bad spelling is invariably termed phonetic spelling. ”

“ The local “spelling reform” of a few half-educated faddists here and there, helps not at all, is a mere nuisance. This is a thing to be worked out in a scientific way by the students of phonetics; they must have a complete alphabet settled for good, a dictionary ready, reading-books well tested, the whole system polished and near perfection before the thing passes out of the specialists’ hands. The really practical spelling-reformer will devote his guineas to endowing chairs of phonetics and supporting publication in phonetic science, and his time to study and open-minded discussion. ”

“ Finding, on recovery, that his phonetic scheme was too daring to be successful, he made several modifications of it, and in 1870 he laid before the Society of Arts a paper 'On a Practical Method of Meeting the Spelling Difficulty in School and in Life,' in which he proposed the use of phonetic orthography concurrently with ordinary spelling. ”

“ Most of the consonants, if pronounced at all, have in all cases one and the same sound. Any possible acquisition of the speech in the term of a man’s natural life has depended upon the fact that these members of the alphabet are in general really phonetic. Their faithfulness to their legitimate sounds stands in sharpest contrast to the almost hopeless disorganization which has overtaken the vowels. ”

“ Any one who has the slightest conception of what a reform of our spelling on pure phonetic principles means will absolve those now urging reform from putting forward any scheme of that sort. It requires, indeed, a singular innocence of all knowledge of this particular subject to make such a charge. Certain changes recommended would, indeed, have brought particular words nearer a phonetic standard. But if everything proposed were to be universally adopted—and even ten times more—the real disease which afflicts our orthography would be but partially alleviated. ”

“ Spelling of words purely in phonetic or even alphabetic characters is not uncommon, the determinative being generally added. Thus in the pyramidal texts we find
Such variant spellings are very important for fixing the readings of word-signs. It is noteworthy that though words were so freely spelled in alphabetic characters, especially in the time of the Old Kingdom, no advance was ever made towards excluding the cumbersome word-signs and biliteral phonograms, which, by a judicious use of determinatives, might well have been rendered quite superfluous. ”

“ For the average man, even of highest cultivation, [Pg 324] it is no more important that shades of pronunciation should be denoted in his alphabet than it would be important for him to lug about in all temperatures and in all climates an astronomical clock with a compensation pendulum. What any working phonetic system would set out to do is to give those broad and easily recognizable characteristics of educated utterance which are sufficient to indicate to the hearer what the speaker is aiming to say. ”

“ A plan of teaching spelling to secure the best results should consist of a thoughtful, systematic, and comprehensive presentation of the words and spelling facts which every pupil must learn. It must contain an adequate and simple system of phonics for the primary grades, since a large percentage [Pg iv] of the words in common use are purely phonetic and present no spelling difficulties once a sane and practical phonetic foundation is fixed. ”

“ Those who fear that if phonetics is taught in the schools it will then follow that our books will be commonly printed in phonetic symbols, should read Dr. Henry Bradley’s lecture to the British Academy ‘On the relations between spoken and written language’ (1913) , and they will see that the Society’s Tract II, on ‘English Homophones’, illustrates the unpractical nature of any scheme either of pure phonetics in the printing of English books, or even of such a scheme as is offered by ‘the Simplified Spelling Society’ ”

“ We subjoin a few heterotypic enormities which might be committed and justified by those learned in the quips and cranks of our "just method of spelling words." The ignorant would naturally be more phonetic in his vagaries. ”

“ I am, however, inclined to think that the radical spelling reform I am hoping for, will be brought about not so much thru a diffusion of phonetic science proper as by one of its accessories, namely phonetic symbolization. Any science needs some more or less conventional symbols; the mathematician has his +, and -, and √, the chemist has his letters and formulas, etc., and similarly the phonetician must have his signs and symbols to denote sounds and their relations. ”

“ In an excursus I have insisted on the great importance of reformed spelling. It is difficult to get people [53] to agree, but any system, Soames’ or Pitman’s or Bell’s, would be better than our present chaos. If Government would give liberty to those who teach a phonetic system, things would improve, and children would easily read ordinary characters afterwards. All who write shorthand must spell phonetically.
Voice production.Not only right articulation needs attention, but what is called voice production. ”

“ The vowel u when marked thus, ü, has the sound heard in Scotch bluid, gude, the French du, almost that of the German ü in Müller. Where more than one pronunciation of a word is given, that which is placed first is more accepted.
The Spelling.—When more than one form of a word is given, that which is placed first is the spelling in current English use. Unfortunately our modern spelling does not represent the English we actually speak, but rather the language of the 16th century, up to which period, generally speaking, English spelling was mainly phonetic, like the present German. ”

“ It will be easily seen that such hypercorrect forms are closely related to those ‘spelling pronunciations’ which become frequent when there is much reading of a language whose spelling is not accurately phonetic; the nineteenth century saw a great number of them, and their number is likely to increase in this century—especially among social upstarts, who are always fond of showing off their new-gained superiority in this and similar ways. ”

“ Any attempt to transliterate into English on a phonetic basis has, moreover, a radical weakness which is too often ignored. So long as pronunciation is not itself standardized, and so long as the human ear does not uniformly carry to a standardized human brain the sound that is uniformly pronounced—and it will be long before these conditions can be fulfilled—even a phonetic system of spelling must adopt some convention; and in that case it is surely best, if a well-recognized convention already exists and is in use among the public at large, to adopt it rather than to invent a new one. ”

“ Our alphabet is radically bad, having a superfluity of symbols for certain simple sounds, and no single symbols for other elements of speech. Most of our vowels are sounded a variety of different ways, the most common ways being inconsistent with the sounds agreed upon in other modern languages. Spelling reformers have been agitating this matter for fifty years, but we are apparently no more ready to reform our alphabet now than when they began. Some of them, accepting the existence of an unchangeable alphabet, have persistently advocated the adoption of a strictly phonetic system of spelling ”

“ Transfer of habits previously acquired is occasionally the cause of misspelling. Children who have learned to read and spell a phonetic language, like German, or a language that proceeds from right to left in spelling, are prone to difficulty with English spelling. ”

“ The best possible preparation for teaching to spell is thoughtful, intelligent drill in phonics. As all modern methods of teaching reading give systematic phonic drills, and thus most children have had some preparation before spelling is begun, the phonetic lists in this book will be found to be easy. Not only will they be easy, if intelligently taught, but they will serve the double purpose of teaching the children to spell intelligently and independently, and of enabling them to recognize new words. ”

“ Pronunciation, like vocabulary, alters, insensibly from generation to generation; the written words ought to record each change as it occurs." Asserting that it is impossible now to inaugurate suddenly a complete series of changes which might readily have been adopted had they been introduced gradually as need arose, M. Meyer tells us that his committee retained existing conventions in so far as they are not in conflict with other conventions no less worthy of consideration, and it denied any wish to establish a phonetic system of spelling. ”

“ They have created for their own use an inconceivably fantastic and phonetic system of spelling which they stubbornly refuse to relinquish and which often makes their writing rather difficult to read. Deeming most of the vowels useless, they keep almost exclusively to the consonants ”

“ I therefore pass on to another field where advantages are likely to accrue from a more extended knowledge of phonetics. The question of spelling reform is a burning one in all civilized countries. Not only in English, but also in French, in German, in Danish, in Swedish, in Russian, and to a much lesser degree in Italian and Spanish, do we find numerous instances of words spelt otherwise than pronounced, of mute and superfluous or ambiguous letters. ”

“ But in the second place I maintain that a thoro reform of the spelling of any civilized nation does not only presuppose a small set of energetic phoneticians who have investigated all the odds and ends of the subject, but will not be possible till the day when the general public have given up what I should call their all-pervading superstition in these matters, their irrational belief that the spelling of words had been settled once for all, as if by some divine command, and that any deviation from the traditional spelling is either ridiculous or else an infallible symptom of low breeding. ”

“ The ear catches the word imperfectly, the lips pronounce it after their own fashion, and the first writer who hears it, sets it down to the best of his ability, to be read, as it may chance, by others, ignorant of the sound the letters were meant to represent, and thus striking out absolute novelties. Even where it travels by the medium of writing, the letters of one language are so inadequate to express the sounds of another, that great changes take place in pronunciation, even while the spelling remains unaltered, and these become visible in the popular contractions. ”