Page:Aristopia (1895).pdf/88

 regularity would have been so much easier and better. He determined to make the conjugations of all verbs, the comparison of all adjectives, and the plurals of all nouns quite regular in all the printing done in his new nation.

The spelling of English of that day was a marvel of confusion. There was no dictionary or other authority or standard of spelling. Although the spelling of a large number of words was somewhat fixed in a barbarous and bungling way, most words were spelled according to the caprices of the writers, and it was no uncommon thing to find the same word spelled two or three different ways in the same paragraph. Then, too, the u's and the v's took each other's places in the most bewildering manner.

Ralph had made a very careful study of the sounds of the language. He saw how utterly inadequate to represent all those sounds were the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet. The only hope of a rational spelling was to invent new characters. So he invented eleven new characters, both print and script; six vowel and five consonant letters. The new vowel letters were mostly small changes in the old letters to represent the cognate sounds of