Page:A plea for phonotypy and phonography - or, speech-printing and speech-writing (IA pleaforphonotypy00elliiala).pdf/31

27 commonest words in our language, is a matter of dispute among the learned, that many of the so-called etymologists have been guilty of the grossest blunders in attributing words to certain roots, and that others have substituted merely fanciful derivations, due to some preconceived idea of what was the primitive language. The majority of the so-called etymologists have contented themselves with merely assigning the language from which the English borrowed a word, but very few, and those only in very late times, and principally among our hard-working neighbours, the Germans, have raised themselves above this word-grubbing, which is, both in practice and result, tedious and worthless, and have looked at etymology in a new and more scientific light; considering not languages but language, and tracing a word not merely as bandied about from one idiom to another, but as forming a part of the original endowment of the power to articulate significant sounds. These men do not want a dead heterography, they want a means of representing living speech. They do not deal with manuscripts which no one can read with certainty, clothed in cabalistic characters, which

"Show the eyes, and grieve the heart; Come like shadows, so depart,"

and "leave not a rack behind,"—these cannot help them to a comparison of articulate sounds, they can only tend to confuse them. They seize an English book, but, lo! they grasp a phantom. It contains not the English language, but what somebody thought, at some time or other, would be a possible representative of what he considered to be the English language, by symbols which he knew to be inefficient. The English language—the true, existing, spoken English language, is as yet an unwritten language, and has, therefore, not yet become the subject of etymological investigation; it is reserved to later times, to etymologists who have the advantage of a phonetic alphabet, to inquire seriously and truly into the etymology of our spoken language. We grant, our present heterography may be useful in tracing the history of our language, but so is the heterography of Chaucer and of Shakspere, and so is the Scotch heterography, so is the gradual change of heterography from the coming in of the Normans, nay, from the first writing of Anglo-Saxon until the present day; but ⸮does any one advocate their present daily use? No; they lie in old volumes upon the shelves of public libraries—very useful to those who are studying the history of the English language, very useless to every body else. Thus, let us hope, in a few years, will lie upon the shelves of our libraries the works now printed in heterotypy, useful to the student of the history of literature and language, but unopened by those who study ideas in place of words.

This thought adds new hope to our opponent,—who is not an imaginary one, for such opponents we have had, and shall have for some time to come; we see him preparing to raise his mighty double-handled sword of error wherewith to smite us to the earth. "⸮What," he asks, triumphantly, "do you recklessly doom to dust and neglect those numberless tomes which the industry of the modern press has given to the world? Would you seal up, against future generations, the knowledge of their forefathers, or condemn them to acquire it at an enormous expenditure of capital? The thing cannot be done; you must give up your scheme, for it will not pay."