Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/490

468 and which we have learned to look upon as a part of the subsisting fabric of our speech; it is natural that we should love even its abuses, and should feel the present inconvenience in ourselves of abandoning it much more keenly than any prospective advantage which may result to us or our successors from such action; that we should therefore look with jealousy upon any one who attempts to change it, questioning narrowly his right to set himself up as its reformer, and the merits of the reforms he proposes. But this natural and laudable feeling becomes a mere blind prejudice, and justly open to ridicule, when it puts on airs, proclaims itself the defender of a great principle, regards inherited modes of spelling as sacred, and frowns upon the phonetist as one who would fain mar the essential beauty and value of the language. Of all the forms of linguistic conservatism, or purism, orthographic purism is the lowest and the easiest; for it deals with the mere external shell or dress of language, and many a one can make stout fight in behalf of the right spelling of a word whose opinion as to its pronunciation even, and yet more its meaning and nice application, would possess no authority or value whatever; hence it is also the commonest, the least reasonable, and the most bigoted. When it claims to be asserting a principle, it is only defending by casuistry a prejudice; it determines beforehand to spell in the prevailing mode, and then casts about to see what reasons besides the mode it can find for doing so, in each particular case. It overwhelms with misapplied etymologic learning him who presumes to write honor and favor for honour and favour (as if it were highly desirable to retain some reminiscence of the French forms, honneur and faveur, through which we have derived them from the Latin honor and favor), and then insists just as strongly, upon neighbour (which is neither French nor Latin); it is not more concerned to preserve the l of calm (Latin calmus) than that of could (Anglo-Saxon cudhe: the l has blundered in, from fancied analogy with would and should), the g of sovereign (Old-English soveraine, French souverain, Italian sovrano) than that of reign (Latin regnum), the s of island (Anglo-Saxon ealand) than that of isle (Old-French isle, Latin insula); it upholds such anomalies as women, which