Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/503

* SPELLING. 431 SPELLING. to phonetic chauge was not, indeed, wholly stopped — for it has continued in some measure until the present day — but it was made more and more difficult, and from tlic sixtcentli century the power of eft'eeting any substantial phonetic improvement of English spelling has been lost. Notwithstanding many later modifications of de- tails (there are still over 3000 words whose orthography is unsettled), the dcvelojjment of English orthography ends with that period, the subsequent life of the spoken language being practically unrepresented in it. In this- direc- tion — that of sound — the alteration has been great, but we still retain what is essentially the Elizabethan spelling, in total disi'egard of the fact that the pronunciation which it embodies has very largely disappeared. Another important source of confusion in Eng- lish spelling, closely associated with this process of fixation, must also be mentioned. Under the in- lluence of the revival of learning, which brought words of classical origin into sjjecial prominence, the idea was developed that (regardless of their pronunciation) such words should be made to conform in spelling as exactly as possible to the Latin and Greek terms from which they were ultimately derived. This etymological theory of spelling gained strength, both from the weakness of the contemporary feeling for phonetic accu- racy and from the practical difficulty found by the printer, in his quest of uniformity, in mak- ing a selection among existing forms, which oifered a wide opportunity for the activity of pedants ; and from the sixteenth century until the present time it has kept its hold upon our orthography. There was much tinkering, not only with words directly borrowed from the class- ical tongues, but also with words of Romance origin, while the native English and Scandi- navian elements of the language were but little interfered with. A result was the introduction of many forms erroneous from both the phonetic and the true philological points of view ; for apart from the indefensibility of this use of spelling as a means of rendering derivation obvious to the eye the method was dangerous in the hands of men whose knowledge of the historj' of the lan- guage was necessarily inadequate. A familiar example is the present English debt (from Early Modern English and Middle English del, dette, from Old French dette), in which the 6 was ety- mologically inserted both in French (though later abandoned) and in English to make the spelling more directly suggest the original Latin dehita, though it has never been pronounced. On the other hand, this process in some cases actu- ally corrupted pronunciation. F^or example, the I in fault (Middle English and Old French faute), which was inserted in the same way, to suggest the Latin fallere, has actually come to he pronounced, though the correct pronunciation (in this particular) survived as late as the time of Pope, who makes the word rhyme with ought, thoufiht. and taught. Qf pure etymological blunders, again, an instance is the s in island, which was inserted to indicate derivation from the Latin insula and connection with English isle (also corrupted from He), to neither of which it is at all related. The corruptions of this kind form a long and instructive li.st. The results of the above-indicated history, em- bodied in modern English orthography, are briefly as follows: ( 1 ) While all of the other principal European alphabets have retained with comparatively small variations the Roman or 'Continental' values of the letters, that of English has to a very large extent abandoned them. This is especially true of the 'long' vowels — at least of their common or name-giving values: Thus, ap- proximately, 'long a' (say) — Cont. e ; 'long e' (mete) := Cont. i; 'long i' (isle) = Cont. diphthong ai; 'long o' — Cont. d; 'long u' (duty) =: Cont. diphthong iu. Great confusion thus exists in the vowel-nomenclature, as well as an xmfortunate divergence from the common usage of those languages which are most closely connected with English, both historically and practically. The quantity of vowels, also, aa was noted above, is not (as in oldest English) distinguished by any alphabetic means, while the various orthographic devices employed for the purpose (doubling of consonants, etc.) are clumsy and are not used with uniformity. (2) The letters of the alphabet are used with a great diversity of sound-values: Thus, of the vowels, accented and unaccented, o has 9 (as in nome, bore, man, father, water, want, ask, village, data), e 9 (be, here, there, acme, met, alert, English, sergeant, prudent) ; t, 8; o, 10; u, 9; y, 3 — 48 in all; of the consonants, 6, 2 ( counting the silent ones ) ; c, 6 ; d, 4 ; f, 3 ; g, 4; h, 3; j, 5; fc, 2; I, 3; m, 3; n, 3; p, 2; q,3; r,2; s, 5; t,5; v,'2 w,2; X, 5 ji, 2 ; ::. 4 — 70 in all. To a certain extent this multiplica- tion of values is due to the inadequacy of the alphabet, which has but 26 sym- bols to represent the 40 elementary sounds of cultivated English speech (44 with the diph- thongs), but it is far in excess of what is neces- sary and results in manifold ambiguities. (3) The various English speech-sounds are written with an even greater variety of symbols and combinations of symbols. These sounds, which comprise 16 vowels and 24 consonants (with 4 diphthongs), are represented in the standard phonetic alphabet, adopted by the American Philological Association, as follows (the sound being that of the corresponding letter in the word placed within the parenthesis) : i (it), e (met), a (ot), a (nsk), e (not), o (obey), Tj (but), u (f»ll), i (pique), e (they), a (oir). fl (orm), s (nor), o (no). (bwrn), u (rule), p (pet), t (fip), ch (cftest), c or k (come), f (fat), th {thin), s (.sown), sh {she), h {he), b (6et), d (dip), j (jest), g {gum), V (i)at), dh {thee), z (sone), zh (asure), w (it-it), 1 (?o, ell), r (rat, are), y (7/e, lyear), m (me), n (»iO), ng (sirij;) : diphthongs, ai (aisle, isle), au {out, hour), ei (oil, hoy), iu (feud, je»). The ways in which these sounds are represented in the customary spelling are too numerous to be here given and ilkistrnted in full, but the orthographic situation will be under- stood from the following examples: i (it), ac- cented or unaccented, is represented by i, y, e, 0, u, ie, ee, ui, ai, hi, ive, co, a, ia, ei, ey, ea, eig ('), ehea, ewi, ois, uy. oi, igh. ay, ieu, as in the following words: fit, h;/mn. pretty, women, busy, sieve, breeches, bt(ild, Saint John (sin'jun), exftibit, firepence (fip'ens), Theobald (tib'ald), carriage, forfeit, donkei/, guineo, sovereign, .James's forehead, houseirife (hus'if), chamois, plagw.v. .Jervots (jer'vis), T>enhigh, 'Rothesay (roth'si), Beauliew (bewli). E (met) = e, ea,