Page:A plea for phonotypy and phonography - or, speech-printing and speech-writing (IA pleaforphonotypy00elliiala).pdf/8

4 ⸮What landsman guesses that boatswain spells "bsun," coxswain, "cocsun," studdingsail, "stinsul," &c., &c.? These you will say are extreme cases; but ⸮why so? Only because your particular avocations have not led you to utter these words, or hear them uttered. Recollect that the foreigner is in the same predicament with respect to all the words in the language; and for this reason—the letters in our alphabet have no fixed sounds attached to them, nor is the same sound invariably represented by the same combination of letters. Now what we plead for is, some system of printing and writing, in which the same sound has always the same symbol, and the same symbol has always the same sound; and this we call, when printed,, from "fn," voice, and "tpos," type; while, the now common, or other style of printing, is termed heterotypy, from "heturos" other, and "tipos" type. When written, we call such a system, from "fn," and "grf" writing; the other style of writing being of course heterography. We ground this plea upon the extraordinary diversity of spellings to be found in the English language representing the same sound, and vice vers. We do not make any assertions at hazard; we are now prepared to prove the crime of "lèse orthografie," high treason against correct spelling, to a most alarming and unprecedented extent, against our language, as the two following tables will show. In the first table, headed "Heterotypic Representation of English Sounds," we have taken the sounds in English as we propose to represent them in Phonotypy, In the Phonographic Journal, No. 3, for March, 1842, the question of Phonotypy was first mooted by Mr. Isaac Pitman. In August, 1843, he became acquainted with the author of this pamphlet, since which time, both have worked together at the alphabet, with some little assistance from others. Printing was commenced in January, 1844; the alphabet was perfected in April, and published in June, 1845. During the whole of that time, unremitting attention was paid to the working of the alphabet, and a great number of experiments tried. We mention this, to show that we are not offering a crude or unconsidered scheme to the public. We do not here give any explanation of Phonography, for which reference must be made to Mr. Pitman's Manual. It is sufficient to state that, independently of its advantage as a system of phonetic writing, it forms when applied to the English language, the most effective short hand yet invented. We have the satisfaction of adding that it is generally appreciated, as upwards of 150,000 phonographic publications have been sold, and the Manual itself has now a steady sale of 2,000 copies a month; and the Phonographic Correspondent, written entirely in the phonographic character, numbers 2000 monthly subscribers. For information concerning the progress of Phonography, reference must be made to the "Intelligence" portion of the Phonotypic Journal. In this pamphlet, we only recommend Phonography upon the score of its giving a correct phonetical representation of the English language, and, therefore, what applies to Phonotypy in this respect applies equally to Phonography. The reader will find a reason given for the great difference in the construction of the phonotypic and phonographic alphabets, in the "Alphabet of Nature," part 3, p. 184. As a matter of curiosity, it may be mentioned that the printer has set up this pamphlet from phonographic short hand copy. and to the right of each symbol we give the symbols, which are heterographically used in different words and on different occasions to represent these sounds, followed by the words themselves in which these symbols are employed. The letters by which the sound appears to be indicated or misrepresented, are printed in italic. This table will serve then to show the meaning of our phonotypes; but in order to make the distinction between heterotypy and phonotypy more apparent, we shall give the phonotypic representation of each word chosen