CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PE 1150.B81 
 
 On the relations between spoken and writ 
 
 3 1924 026 631 972 
 
Qfarnell UtttuEtattg Slihrarg 
 
 3ltl;aca, NetP ^ortt 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
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 THE GrpT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://archive.org/details/cu31924026631972 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN 
 ENGLISH 
 
This paper, which was read at the International 
 Historical Congress, April 191 3, is reprinted from 
 the Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. VI, 
 by the kind permission of the Council of the 
 British Academy. 
 
ON THE RELATIONS BETWEEN 
 
 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN 
 LANGUAGE 
 
 WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO 
 
 ENGLISH 
 
 By 
 HENRY BRADLEY 
 
 M.A., Hon. D.Litt. Oxon. 
 
 Senior Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary 
 
 Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford 
 
 Fellow of the British Academy 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 1919 
 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK 
 
 TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 PUBLISHER lO TH£ UNIVERSITY 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN 
 ENGLISH 
 
 Many of the advocates of spelling reform are in the 
 habit of asserting, as if it were an axiom admitting of no 
 dispute, that the sole function of writing is to represent 
 sounds. It appears to me that this is one of those spurious 
 truisms that are not intelligently believed by any one, but 
 which continue to be repeated because nobody takes the 
 trouble to consider what they really mean. I do not merely 
 deny the truth of the pretended axiom as a description of 
 the relations between speech and writing as they exist at 
 the present day in English and other languages. I assert 
 that, so far as peoples of literary culture are concerned, 
 there never was a time when this formula would have 
 correctly expressed the facts ; and that it would still remain 
 false, even if an accurately phonetic spelling had been in 
 universal use for hundreds of years. 
 
 In order to understand distinctly the real import of the 
 current statement, it will be well to consider the one 
 case in which it is incontestably correct. A system of 
 musical notation cannot perfectly fulfil its purpose unless 
 it is so constructed that it will enable a competent musician 
 who has mastered the system to know exactly, on looking 
 at a composition written in the notation, what are the 
 sounds which the composer intended his performers to 
 produce. If a piece of written music does not attain this 
 end with a reasonable approximation to correctness, it is 
 useless, and might just as well not exist at all. 
 
 Now the assertion that the sole function of writing is to 
 represent sounds amounts to saying that the case of written 
 language is exactly parallel to that -of written music. If 
 
 8277.1 A 3 
 
4 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 this be so, it must follow that unless the written form of 
 an unknown word suffices to convey a fairly correct notion 
 of its pronunciation to a fully instructed reader, then that 
 word might just as well not have been written at all. We 
 shall have to say that a piece of writing is useful in the 
 precise degree in which it is phonetically spelt, and no 
 further. Perhaps no one will venture to say that this state- 
 ment is in accord with the facts ; but unless the current 
 pseudo-axiom means this, I am at a loss to imagine what 
 it can mean. The truth is that between written music and 
 written language there is one all-important difference. In 
 written music the representation of sounds is the absolutely 
 ultimate end. In written language it is only a means. 
 We use visible symbols for the sounds of speech because 
 spoken sounds are symbols of meaning. The ultimate 
 end, and for most purposes, though not for all, the only 
 important end, of written language is to convey meaning. 
 Now the degree in which a piece of writing or print is 
 capable of conveying its meaning does not at all necessarily 
 depend on the accuracy with which it suggests the sounds 
 that would have been heard if the composition had been 
 spoken instead of being written. Let us consider an ex- 
 treme case. It is well known that, in the days before the 
 modern improvements in the teaching of the deaf and 
 dumb, many deaf-mutes were successfully taught to read 
 printed books with understanding, and to express their 
 thoughts intelligibly in writing. For these persons a word 
 was simply a group of visible marks, the direct symbol of 
 an idea. For them, of course, the tetters of the alphabet 
 could not possibly be associated with any audible sounds, 
 nor even, as they are for their better trained successors, 
 with movements of the organs of speech. In this case 
 alphabetic writing was a total failure so far as its proxi- 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 5 
 
 mate end was concerned, and yet for its ultimate purpose 
 it was a complete success. The middle step had simply 
 been jumped over. Now, as I shall show later on, educated 
 persons, gifted with hearing and speech, do in their mental 
 reading constantly perform this very feat of jumping over 
 the middle step. By long habit, they have formed direct 
 associations between certain familiar groups of letters and 
 the meanings which they represent. Their purpose in 
 reading being to arrive at the meaning, they find a quicker 
 way of doing so than that of translating every written 
 word into its audible equivalent. In this fact we shall 
 find the explanation of much that might otherwise seem 
 unaccountable in the history of written language. 
 
 It is universally admitted that writing began by being 
 ideographic. The earliest written characters were pictures, 
 which at first stood for the objects depicted, and afterwards 
 became also symbols of qualities, actions, and relations. 
 It is conceivable that if mankind had been all deaf-mutes, 
 they might have developed on this basis a written language 
 as complete and efiScient for its purpose as oral speech. 
 But as the peoples that invented writing were already in 
 possession of one elaborate system for the expression of 
 thought (namely, a spoken language), it was in the nature 
 of things impossible that they should take the needless 
 trouble of devising a second system co-extensive with the 
 first and independent of it. Hence the written sign 
 gradually ceased to represent merely an idea, and became 
 the symbol of some one of the various spoken words by 
 which that idea could be expressed. The next step was 
 to let the written sign stand for the sound of a spoken 
 word irrespective of its meaning. That is to say, the 
 character which had come to be the symbol of a particu- 
 lar spoken word (i. e. of a certain sequence of sounds 
 
6 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 expressing an idea) was now allowed to denote any other 
 words that were pronounced in the same way. Still later, 
 it was found that polysyllabic words for which no symbol 
 existed could be written by splitting them up into syllables 
 that had already acquired their special signs ; and new 
 characters were invented to express those syllables which 
 were not separately significant. I cannot now attempt 
 to trace in detail the subsequent steps of the process which 
 ended in the formation of a complete alphabet, in which 
 every elementary sound of a language, so far as the in- 
 ventor's skill in phonetic analysis could go, was repre- 
 sented by a distinct letter. But the penultimate stage in 
 this development has a peculiar interest. 
 
 The western Semitic nations, some thirty centuries ago, 
 had got rid of the ideographic principle in their writing. 
 Their script took account of sound only, not of meaning ; 
 moreover, their characters represented not syllables, but 
 simple sound-elements. Their alphabet, however, con- 
 sisted of consonants only, for the vowels were left un- 
 written. Even to this day, although vowel-marks have 
 been invented, Arabic is for ordinary purposes nearly 
 always written without them. This implies that the 
 native reader would very often be unable to pronounce a 
 word on the page before him unless he knew its meaning, 
 and that might be determinable only by inference from 
 the after part of the sentence. At first sight, it might 
 appear that reading under these conditions must be a 
 diflScult business. But while the ear and mouth, in hearing 
 and pronouncing, can only take the sounds of a word in 
 succession, the eye is capable of surveying a large number 
 of written letters at once. When we ourselves are reading 
 aloud, do we usually look at the several letters of a word 
 in succession, and pronounce them as they come ? Not if 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 7 
 
 the word is one that we are acquainted with. The group 
 of letters, seen as a whole, enables us to identify the word 
 intended, and having thus identified it we pronounce it 
 from habit. Even if the word is quite new to us — a proper 
 name, for instance — the syllable, rather than the letter, is 
 the unit present to consciousness. Hence it is that when 
 a word is misprinted, we often read it as the author in- 
 tended without being aware of the misprint.^ Further, 
 those who are in the habit of reading a great deal of some 
 particular kind of technical literature will admit that very 
 often a familiar and unambiguous abbreviation is more 
 quickly read than the word would be if written in full. 
 The rjsason is that a mere hint is enough to enable us to 
 identify the word intended by the writer, and the single 
 letter requires less effort to apprehend than the group of 
 letters. Many mediaeval Latin MSS. are written with 
 nearly every word abbreviated. We rightly judge that it 
 must have required an arduous training to enable a man 
 to read rapidly a text written in this fashion, and when 
 writing to hit always on the proper contraction without 
 an instant's hesitation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that in 
 the Middle Ages a man who had mastered the art of read- 
 ing abbreviated MSS., and seldom saw any others, would 
 find the contractions no hindrance, but a help to rapidity 
 of reading. However this may be, it is certain that to an 
 accomplished reader it does not, except in rare instances, 
 matter a jot whether his native language is phonetically 
 spelt or not ; what is important to him is that the group 
 
 ' Many years ago, I saw in a newspaper an announcement of a person's 
 death, with the startling addition, ' Fiends will kindly accept this 
 intimation '. I cut out the paragraph, mounted it on a card, and showed it 
 to a large number of persons, who all read it over several times without 
 detecting anything wrong in it. 
 
8 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 of letters before him shall be that which habit has led 
 him to associate with a certain word. An unphonetic 
 system of spelling, however, is liable to have one fault 
 which may on occasion give trouble to even the most 
 practised reader. This fault, which may be called phonetic 
 ambiguity, consists in the use of one and the same group 
 of letters to represent two words that differ in pronun- 
 ciation. A system of spelling might be very far from being 
 phonetically accurate without having this particular defect; 
 but our traditional English orthography has it in a very 
 marked degree.^ That the past tense of the verb to read 
 is spelt the same as the present tense, though pronounced 
 differently ; that bow may be either (bau) or (bou) ; that 
 lead may be either the verb (lid) or the name of the metal 
 (led) — these anomalies, and many others like them, put 
 us back into the predicament of the Arab, who has to 
 survey the whole sentence before he can pronounce its 
 component words. The grievance is not, perhaps, very 
 severely felt by us, any more than it is by the Arab, 
 because the trained eye and mind have acquired the power 
 of taking in a whole series of written words at a glance. 
 Nevertheless, the sternest of orthographical conservatives 
 can hardly deny that — apart from all regard to the 
 difficulties of the learner — this particular feature of English 
 spelling ought if possible to be reformed. 
 
 The main reason why a system of writing that repre- 
 sents the sounds of the spoken language is better than the 
 primitive ideographic system is that it is so enormously 
 easier to learn. It has no doubt some other advantages 
 also. But sometimes an ideograph is able to convey its 
 
 ^ This fault has not been altogether avoided in the system proposed by 
 the London Simplified Spelling Society, which writes ' cwiet ' for quiti 
 and q%Uie, and < loeth ' for loth and loatht. 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 9 
 
 meaning far more quickly and effectively than words can. 
 We still use certain ideographs with manifest advantage. 
 If a number extending to millions is expressed in words, 
 we find it helpful to write it down in figures to get a better 
 notion of it. The letters and signs of algebra are ideo- 
 graphs, and the science could not have come into existence 
 at all if words had had to be used instead of them. Now 
 because the need has been felt for a more direct method 
 of symbolizing thought than that which phonetic writing 
 supplies, it has come to pass that the written languages of 
 Europe, which were once purely phonetic, are now to a 
 certain extent ideographic. 
 
 This statement may perhaps seemdifficultto understand. 
 The following remarks will, I hope, make it clear. When 
 we read mentally for our own information, we do not 
 usually, as children do, go through the process of imagin- 
 ing the sound of each word, and then translating the sound 
 into meaning. In many cases the habit of much reading 
 has established for us a direct association between the 
 aspect of a written word and its meaning. I have some- 
 times tried, after rapidly reading a page of print, to discover 
 as well as I could what had been in my consciousness 
 during the process. Such introspection is difficult, and one 
 must not be too sure of the truth of its results. However, 
 what I seem to find is something like this. Many of the 
 words have conveyed to my mind simply the notion of 
 their meaning, unaccompanied by any sound-picture at 
 all ; others have been distinctly heard by my mental ear ; 
 and of many words phonetic fragments have presented 
 themselves, partly in the form of mentally heard sounds,, 
 partly in that of imagined movements of the organs of 
 speech. In general, when a word denotes a visual object 
 or an acute physical sensation, the meaning is the thing 
 
19 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 that I am conscious of first. If I receive a letter 
 beginning ' My deer Sir ', I have seen a vision of a horned 
 animal before my mental ear has perceived the sound of 
 the word. The experience of other people in thesematters 
 may be different to some extent from mine. But I think 
 most practised readers will agree that for them also many 
 written words have become direct symbols of their 
 meanings. Further, I do not suppose that I am alone in 
 finding in the visible aspect of many words a sort of 
 physiognomic effect, which in my case is sometimes rather 
 annoyingly inappropriate to their meaning. A curious 
 illustration of this point occurs to me. Some years ago, 
 a circular was addressed, in the interests of the Oxford 
 English Dictionary^ to a large number of persons, asking 
 whether they thought the word grey should be spelt with 
 an a or an e. Many of the replies, especially those from 
 artists, were to the effect that the writers apprehended 
 grey and gray as different words, denoting different 
 varieties of colour. 
 
 In the preceding paragraph I have tried to show that 
 systems of writing that were originally phonetic tend to 
 become ideographic with regard to their use or function. 
 I wish now to point out further that the cultivated written 
 languages of Europe have all become partly ideographic 
 also with regard to their structure. That is, they include 
 features which are phonetically useless — which convey 
 no information relating to sound — but which are valued 
 because they make the meaning clearer. Such are our 
 use of initial capitals to distinguish proper names and the 
 like ; quotation marks ; the apostrophe used to show 
 that a sound which is part of our notion of a word is 
 omitted in pronunciation; and the apostrophe (indefensible 
 on any other ground than convenience) which is put 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH ii 
 
 before the j of the possessive singular and after the s of 
 the possessive plural. Most people will admit that these 
 devices have their use ; but some reformers, faithful to 
 their principle that writing exists only to represent sound, 
 tell us that if they were abolished we should soon learn 
 to do without them. Which may be quite true, but does 
 not prove that we should not be any the worse off. 
 
 But this is not all. In English, French, and other 
 languages, there are many pairs of words of differing 
 meaning, which were once pronounced differently and 
 written phonetically, but have come to be alike in sound. 
 Now because to the ordinary person it is more important 
 that a written word should quickly and surely suggest its 
 meaning than that it should express its sound, the old 
 spelling has been allowed to remain unaltered. The 
 difference of spelling, once phonetically significant, has 
 become a mere ideographic device. Thus written English 
 makes a distinction between the like-sounding words 
 which occur in such sentences as these : 
 
 Phaethon was the son of the Sun. 
 
 The hair of the hare is commonly called fur. 
 
 The poor man had hidden the whole of his savings 
 in a hole in his wall. 
 
 The knight spent the night in prayer. 
 
 Are the roads in Rhodes good ? 
 
 We rode to the side of the lake and then rowed 
 across. 
 
 Send these boots to the cobbler to be soled, and the 
 
 others to the auctioneer to be sold. 
 
 Sentences of this kind might be multiplied indefinitely. 
 
 It is true that in these particular contexts the spoken words 
 
 are not ambiguous ; I had to devise examples that could 
 
 be read aloud without explanation. But it quite often 
 
 JSJ7.1 A 3 
 
12 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGI.ISH 
 
 happens that words are used in writing without any fear 
 of misunderstanding, though if the passage were read 
 aloud the hearer would misapprehend or be puzzled. A 
 newspaper says that somebody has invented a new 
 sowing-machine ; the reader understands at once, but the 
 hearer does not, that it is an agricultural implement. I 
 once heard quoted the statement that Trafalgar Square 
 is the finest sight (or site) in London. Whether the word 
 meant ' spectacle ' or ' situation ' I cannot guess. The 
 ' rights (or rites) of the Church ' and ' matrimonial rights 
 (or rites) ' are expressions that are unambiguous in print, 
 but may bear two different meanings when spoken ; and 
 I have known them used in contexts which left the choice 
 of interpretation open. In writing or in print, I maysafely 
 refer to ' my two ingenious friends ', meaning ' my two 
 friends who are ingenious '; if I do so in a speech or in 
 conversation, I may be taken to mean ' my friends who 
 are too ingenious '. In a work on trigonometry I find a 
 sentence containing the word sine and also the word sign 
 in its mathematical sense ; this causes no difficulty to the 
 reader, but in an oral lecture the sentence would be quite 
 unintelligible. If I read that Mr. So-and-so is a flower- 
 merchant, I am in no danger of supposing (as I should 
 if I merely heard the statement) that he deals in the 
 material of my daily bread.^ A distinguished poet has 
 used the expression ' my knightly task ' ; the silent k 
 makes his meaning clear, but when the poem is recited 
 
 ' It may be replied that^oMj-is a monosyllable sxA flower s. disy liable. 
 Some people are careful to make this useful distinction of pronunciation, 
 but it originated as the interpretation of an arbitrary distinction in spelling. 
 The two words are not distinguished in Johnson's Dictionary (1755) 
 where ' the finest part of meal ' appears as one of the senses oi flower. 
 Those 'spelling-pronunciations', which some philologists treat with such 
 fierce contempt, really have their use sometimes I 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 13 
 
 the hearer may be excused if he misunderstands. The 
 compiler of a concise vocabulary of a foreign language 
 can use, without risk of being misunderstood, such brief 
 renderings as ' son ', ' sun ', ' knight ', 'night ', 'oar ', 'ore', 
 ' hair ', ' hare,' ' to dye ', ' to die ', ' to sow ', ' to sew ', ' to 
 rain ', and ' to reign '. If English were written phonetic- 
 ally, he would have to add explanations. 
 
 Now there can be no reasonable doubt that the graphic 
 differentiation of homophones does, so far as it goes, 
 render written English a better instrument of expression 
 than spoken English. It is not merely that the written 
 language is not liable to those actual misunderstandings 
 that sometimes occur in conversation, and are oftener 
 avoided by awkward shifts. Even when no misunder- 
 standing is possible, it is an advantage not to be disturbed 
 in our mental reading by obscure suggestions of irrelevant 
 meanings. It is because the expression of meaning is 
 felt to be the real purpose of written language that these 
 distinctions still survive, in spite of the disastrous effect 
 that they have had on the phonetic intelligibility of written 
 words. 
 
 The pressure of the ideographic need, as we may call 
 it, explains many things that are often thought extra- 
 ordinary in the history of English spelling. At one time 
 the past tense of miss was often spelt phonetically mist. 
 The unphonetic spelling inissed. has been re-established. 
 Why ? ' Sheer perversity ', says the ardent spelling 
 reformer. But mankind do not make changes out of 
 sheer perversity, but because they somehow feel them to 
 be convenient. In this case missh, the accustomed symbol 
 for a certain verbal concept, and ed for the notion of past 
 tense. When the two symbols are put together unaltered, 
 the combined meaning is more vividly suggested than it 
 
14 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 is by the phonetic spelling, which moreover is associated 
 with a different word. Perhaps even such pedantic freaks 
 as the etymological spelling of debt and doubt^ or even 
 the pseudo-etymological spelling of scissors, may not 
 originally have been without some utilitarian excuse. In 
 an age when educated Englishmen read and wrote more 
 Latin than English, a spelling that suggested a Latin 
 word of cognate meaning may very well have been helpful 
 to rapid apprehension of the import of the written word. 
 It is a recognized defect of English (as compared with 
 Greek or German) that the words that are related in 
 meaning are so often unrelated in form : that, for instance, 
 our only adjectives corresponding to the nouns house and 
 mind are dofnestic and mental, and our only noun 
 corresponding to the verb to owe is debt. For the 
 educated Englishman of the sixteenth century, this 
 weakness in his native language was partly compensated 
 for through his familiarity with Latin, and he may have 
 found that certain English words gained in expressive 
 force by a spelling that brought them into visible associa- 
 tion with their real or supposed originals in the learned 
 language with which he was so much at home. Although, 
 however, we may admit that the ' pedantic ' spellings of 
 the sixteenth century once served a useful purpose, it 
 does not follow that we ought to perpetuate them now 
 that the conditions which gave them their value no longer 
 exist.^ 
 
 We have now shown that, in consequence of our 
 
 ' It is certainly absurd that we should go on -writing victual when we 
 pronounce ' vit'l '. I suspect, however, that the man who first wrote 
 victual did not intend it for an improved spelling of vittal, but for a new 
 word, which was to supersede, in pronunciation as well as in writing, 
 what he regarded as a vulgar corruption. If so, he succeeded only in 
 half his enterprise. 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 15 
 
 common practice of reading without thoroughgoing 
 translation into sound, written language has to a great 
 extent become an instrument for the direct expression 
 of meaning, co-ordinate with audible language. The 
 , result of this has been that the written language has in 
 part been developed on lines of its own, independent of 
 the development of oral speech. It is true that the two 
 are clpsely correlated : every spoken word, theoretically 
 at least, has its proper spelling, and every written word 
 its proper pronunciation. But in all cultivated nations 
 the literary vocabulary is, for obvious reasons, vastly 
 more extensive than the vocabulary of conversation ; it 
 has a great nmnber of words that are used almost ex- 
 clusively in writing. In German, the majority of these 
 words are compounds or derivatives of popular words, and 
 therefore every German has some notion of at least their 
 literal meaning. In English it is far otherwise, owing to 
 the abundance of words taken from Latin and Greek. 
 For centuries, many of our English writers have been 
 classically educated, and have written chiefly for classically 
 educated readers. Hence they have not scrupled, when 
 they wanted a word to express their meaning, to invent 
 one by anglicizing a Greek or Latin word, or by forming 
 a derivative from it, or, again, by making a new Greek or 
 Latin compound, and then anglicizing that ; assuming 
 that the reader would at once recognize the intended 
 meaning from the etymology. (Let me here remark that 
 although I am sometimes called an optimist in my views 
 of the excellence of the English language, I do consider 
 that the results of this practice are deplorable.) Now 
 observe that for us moderns a Greek or Latin word is 
 primarily a succession of letters of the alphabet, not a 
 succession of sounds. True, we do pronounce it, after 
 
i6 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 a fashion ; but still we feel that the essential thing is the 
 written form, not the spoken one. Hence, the great mass 
 of English dei-ivatives from Greek and Latin have origi- 
 nated in the following curious way. The group of letters 
 constituting a Latin word, or anew-made Latin compound, 
 has been taken into written English, and provided with 
 an English termination ; or the. group of letters forming 
 a Greek word or new-made Greek compound is trans- 
 literated as the Romans would have done it, and then an 
 English written word is made out of the result of this 
 operation. When we are reading aloud, we have to 
 pronounce these words somehow, and there are certain 
 broad rules for doing this ; but the rules are somewhat 
 vague and uncertain, so that different people pronounce 
 the word differently. This is not felt to matter very 
 much ; the fact being that for these words the normal 
 relation between alphabetic writing and speech is simply 
 reversed : the group of letters is the real word, and the 
 pronunciation merely its symbol.^ When once in a way 
 we hear such a word spoken, our thought flies to its 
 customary spelling, and perhaps from that to some Greek 
 or Latin written word, and then we perceive its meaning. 
 The number of these primarily graphic words has been 
 enormously increased of late years, and is increasing every 
 day, because of the growth of a scientific terminology 
 derived from Greek, The scientist doe's not usually 
 concern himself much about the pronunciation of his own 
 coinages. He does not even take care to avoid phonetic 
 identity with some existing terni. We thus get such 
 
 ' It would be correct, as far as this class of words is concerned, to say 
 that the written form is the direct symbol of thought, that the pronuncia- 
 tion is the symbol of this symbol, and that the written representation of 
 the pronunciation is a symbol of a symbol of a symbol ! 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH i^ 
 
 awkward pairs of words as psychosis and sycosis, which 
 mean very diiferent things, but are commonly pronounced 
 alike. The adjectives cirrhous and scirrhous describe 
 two different morbid conditions of the liver. It has 
 actually happened that a man of science, when apked by 
 a lexicographer how a word of his own invention should 
 be pronounced, has replied that it was the lexicographer's 
 business to settle that question. It may be remarked 
 that most of these newly-formed terms have international 
 currency : a foreign scientist, reading an English book 
 on his own subject, needs no dictionary for most of the 
 technical words, because they are spelt nearly in the same 
 way as those of his own language. If we were to adopt 
 phonetic spelling for these words, he would often have 
 first to pronounce them, and then render their pronuncia- 
 tion back into its originalj the obsolete spelling, before 
 he could understand them.^ 
 
 It is a curious fact that the formation of English deriva- 
 tives from proper names familiar to everybody often takes 
 place through the medium of the spelling. The names 
 Canada and Bacon are known even to illiterate people ; 
 but the adjectives relating to Canada and Bacon are not 
 derived from these words as spoken ; if they were, they 
 would be pronounced ka^nadian and dei'knian. They are 
 
 ■ Although I disbelieve in the value of artificial languages for the 
 purposes of literature, I think it not impossible, and certainly much to be 
 desired, that a time may come when all European works of abstruse 
 science will be written in some as yet unborn successor of Esperanto or 
 Ido. At present our English dictionaries are burdened with an enormous 
 and daily increasing mass of scientific terms that are not English at all 
 except in the form of their terminations and in the pronunciations 
 inferred from their spelling. The adoption of an international language 
 for science would bring about the disappearance of these monstrosities of 
 un-English English, and thus remove one of the great obstacles in the 
 way of spelling reform. 
 
i8 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 formed by taking- the six letters that spell Canada, and the 
 five that spell Bacon, and then tacking on to them the 
 letters ian. We pronounce the resulting written words 
 according to rules ultimately originating in our traditional 
 mispronunciation of Latin. Anybody who can read sees 
 at once how the adjectives are formed, and probably 
 thinks the process quite natural. An illiterate person, 
 or one who knew nothing but phonetic spelling, would 
 be utterly unable to see any connexion between the ad- 
 jectives and the proper names. 
 
 But the dependence of the oral on the written language 
 extends to other derivatives than those of proper names. 
 Our etymological dictionaries tell us, for instance, that 
 criticize is ' from critic ^ -ize '. This information is quite 
 correct, and there is no reason for calling it insuflScient. 
 But in a dictionary written in phonetic spelling for the 
 use of students unacquainted with the traditional ortho- 
 graphy, the statement that kritisaiz is 'from kriiik + aiz ' 
 would be obviously defective. The student would ask 
 why the final k of kritik should change into j when the 
 suflSx -aiz was appended. The answer would be too 
 voluminous to be given in the article on the verb ; there 
 would have to be a reference to the section of the 
 etymological introduction in which all similar cases would 
 be dealt with. And the explanation would be to the effect 
 that this change of k into j was not due to any phonetic 
 law of the English language ; that such words as kritisaiz 
 were formed not in speech but in writing (or with a view 
 to their written form), in the days when the English used 
 an alphabet in which the character c stood for the sound 
 k when final, but for the sound j when followed by the 
 character i\ and that these words could not have been 
 formed at all (in their existing phonetic shape) if English 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 19 
 
 had always been a spoken language merely, or had always 
 been written phonetically. Again, look at the words 
 rhetorical and rhetorician. Just because we know how 
 to read, we think the relation between them is obvious 
 and simple. Why, they are quite alike except in the 
 last two or three letters. It is difficult to put ourselves 
 ' in the room of the unlearned ', whose ear will not tell 
 him that the two words are connected at all. They 
 have in common the consonant-sequence r-t-r^ but that 
 similarity is obscured by the difference in vowels and in 
 incidence of stress. The conclusion of this whole matter 
 is that while in ancient Greek (for instance) the processes 
 of derivation are exactly what they would have been if 
 writing had never existed, in modern English these 
 processes cannot be fully accounted for without reference 
 to the history of the written language. This proposition 
 nobody will deny, but many philologists have failed to 
 appreciate its fuU importance. 
 
 I have dwelt much on the fact that in the silent reading 
 that fills up so much of the time of most people nowadays, 
 it matters little for the most part whether we mentally 
 pronounce the words or not. When, however, we are 
 reading poetry, or any kind of prose that depends for 
 its effect on euphony or phonetic expressiveness, our 
 appreciation will be very imperfect unless we either 
 pronounce the words audibly or imagine their sound. We 
 find, accordingly, that many poets have shown some 
 leaning to phonetic improvements in spelling. They 
 have good reason for this. . It is true, as I have shown, 
 that an unphonetic spelling does not lead a practised 
 reader to mispronounce; but the half-conscious suggestion 
 of a wrong pronunciation that it caUs up may be enough 
 to disturb the clearness of mental hearing. At the same 
 
20 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 time, poets of literary culture are apt to be very sensitive 
 to the traditional associations and visual symbolism of 
 written forms, and hence their advocacy of phonetic 
 spelling is seldom uncompromisingly thorough. In the 
 line of The Princess, 
 
 Nor burnt (he grange, nor buss'd the milking-maid, 
 
 Tennyson was careful to substitute an apostrophe for the 
 silent e of bussed. But it is not easy to imagine that he 
 would have consented to write the word as 'bust ', or that 
 he would have been delighted with the Simplified Spelling 
 Society's rendering of a line of In Memoriam as ' This 
 truuth caim born bi beer and paul '. It would be well, 
 I think, if custom allowed to poets a greater degree of 
 freedom to spell words according to their own taste. I 
 feel sure that some of the poets of the nineteenth century, 
 if they had not been afraid of shocking the prejudices of 
 their readers, would gladly have availed themselves of 
 orthographical licences as a means of adding to their 
 resources of expression, and that the results would often 
 have been very interesting. In this connexion it may be 
 appropriate to remark that the habit of mental reading 
 for meaning only is likely, unless efforts are made to 
 counteract its effect, greatly to impair our capacity for 
 appreciating the beauty of verse and of elevated prose 
 style. 
 
 The object of this paper would be seriously misappre- 
 hended if it were supposed to be primarily concerned 
 with the question of the reform of English spelling. My 
 chief aim has been to discover and set forth, to the best 
 of my ability, the nature of the relations that exist between 
 spoken and written language in general, and between 
 spoken and written English in particular. The subject 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 21 
 
 is to me full of interest as a part of the science of language, 
 and that interest would be but little diminished if the 
 spelling-reform controversy did not exist. At the same 
 time, it is almost impossible to lay down any proposition 
 with regard to the relations between written and spoken 
 English that does not obviously involve some inference 
 as to the merits and defects of the traditional orthography, 
 or the magnitude of the diflSculties in the way of any 
 attempt to improve it. The general tendency of what I 
 have said with regard to these points is to show that the 
 existing ('partly ideographic') spelling,,/^;' those who are 
 thoroughly familiar with it, fulfils the chief end of 
 written language better than a purely phonetic system if 
 equally familiar could fulfil it ; and that (owing to certain 
 peculiar conditions of the English language) the temporary 
 practical inconveniences attendant on any extensive 
 change, and, consequently, the difficulties of procuring 
 acceptance for even beneficial reforms, are far greater than 
 is often supposed. 
 
 The preceding discussion, however, has entirely ignored 
 one consideration that is of the utmost importance. There 
 is no doubt that those unphonetic features of our spelling, 
 which have their practical value for the educated adult, 
 do add enormously to the difficulty of learning to read 
 and write. The waste of time in education caused by the 
 want of consistent relation between the written and the 
 spoken word is a serious evil, which urgently calls for 
 a remedy. After all, it is the interest of the learner, not 
 that of the person who has mastered all the difficulties, 
 that has the first claim to consideration. 
 
 Now there are many who think that nothing will greatly 
 lessen the difficulties of the learner short of the adoption 
 of a purely phonetic system — not necessarily a system in 
 
22 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 which each letter would stand for one and only on6 
 elementary sound, but at any rate one in which, by the ^ 
 help of a few simple rules, the spelling of any word could 
 be inferred with approximate correctness from its pro- 
 nunciation, and vice versa. These persons maintain that 
 the gain resulting from such a reform would greatly 
 exceed the loss (which some of them admit to be con- 
 siderable) ; and that the difficulty of procuring acceptance 
 for it, although enormous, is. not insuperable. If only I 
 were convinced that these views are correct, I should feel 
 bound to range myself on the side of the advocates of 
 radical reform. But I have already indicated that I regard 
 radical reform as impracticable; and I believe, further, 
 that the difficulties of the learner can be greatly relieved 
 by more moderate measures, which, though they will 
 have to encounter formidable obstacles, might be carried 
 into effect by wisely-directed effort. To argue this last 
 point would carry me too far away from the purpose I 
 have had in view. But it falls strictly within the limits of my 
 subject to inquire what would be the effect on the English 
 language if phonetic spelling were to be adopted. If it 
 be said that on my own principles such a discussion is 
 void of practical interest, I may reply, first, that from the 
 purely scientific point of view it may have its value, as 
 affording further illustration of the relations between 
 speech and writing ; and, secondly, that, as I do not claim 
 to be infallible, I cannot undertake to say that some 
 unforeseen conjuncture of circumstances may not some 
 day bring about a change which at present seems outside 
 the range of possibility. 
 
 I am aware that in speaking of the effect that a phonetic 
 reform would be likely to have on the English language, 
 I am running counter to the common assertion of spelling 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 23 
 
 reformers, that changes in spelling affect only the mode 
 of representation of the language, and have nothing to do 
 with the language itself. This assertion seems to me to 
 rest on an altogether superficial view of the facts. If it 
 be true, as I have shown, that the English language (chiefly, 
 indeed, but not quite exclusively, literary English) is to 
 a considerable extent the creature of its written form, it 
 follows that an extensive change in the written form 
 cannot leave the substance of the language unaltered. 
 The substitution of phonetic spelling for the received 
 system would, I am persuaded, very seriously modify the 
 character of the English vocabulary. It may, perhaps, 
 excite surprise when I add that the ultimate effect of the 
 change, so far as it is capable of being foreseen, would in 
 certain respects be for good. I do not pretend that I 
 should look forward with entire complacency to a change 
 which must hasten the coming of the time when the 
 literature of to-day and of earlier days will be intelligible, 
 untranslated, only to philologists ; but I think it likely 
 that if phonetic spelling be adopted, the English language, 
 when it emerges from the period of confusion which the 
 alteration must bring in, will have been freed from some 
 of its most prominent defects. 
 
 We have seen that one notable weakness of spoken 
 English is the multitude of words that are pronounced 
 alike but differ in meaning. The partial freedom of the 
 written language from this fault is in itself a good thing ; 
 but it tends to perpetuate the evil by rendering it more 
 tolerable. With educated people, the utterance of a word 
 is usually accompanied by some obscure reminiscence of 
 its spelling; their notion of the word is a blend of its 
 audible and its visible form. Hence, when two woi-ds of 
 the same sound happen to be distinguished in spelling. 
 
24 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 we are often imperfectly conscious of their identity to 
 the ear. From this cause, writers and speakers often fall 
 unawares into, or do not feel it worth while to avoid, 
 equivoques that would have a strange effect if the language 
 were purely oral or phonetically written. For the same 
 reason, the reader seldom observes these ambiguities at 
 all, and even the hearer is ordinarily very tolerant of them; 
 but sometimes they are too ludicrous to escape notice.' 
 There are many current stories, authentic and otherwise, 
 that might be quoted in illustration of this point. Prob- 
 ably it is only a fiction that a book of travel was once 
 offered to a publisher, bearing the title, ' Hallowed Spots 
 of Greece'. But it is a well-attested fact that a distin- 
 guished orator did, to his own great annoyance, excite the 
 laughter of an Oxford audience by saying, ' We must 
 consider Oxford as a whole ; and what a whole it is ! ' 
 Now, oral language, when the influence of writing does 
 not interfere, shows a tendency to free itself from such 
 homophones as often cause inconvenience. When queen 
 and quean came to be pronounced alike, it was inevitable 
 that the latter should become obsolete as a spoken word. 
 It is still now and then used as a literary archaism ; but 
 when phonetic spelling is established it will wholly dis- 
 appear from the language, and if the books that contain 
 it are reprinted in the new orthography it will require a 
 footnote. Very often, where two words of like sound are 
 freely used in literature, it will be found that only one of 
 them survives in speech. And even when both words 
 are colloquially familiar in educated use, the illiterate 
 classes have replaced one of them by some synonym. It 
 is a curious fact that such an apparently indispensable 
 word as son has ceased to be vernacular in the dialects of 
 many pairts of England, although daughter is in everyday 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 25 
 
 use. The speaker of pure dialect understands it as a 
 word belonging to the language of the educated, but to 
 employ it in ordinary talk would be deemed an affectation. 
 In some dialects son is, as I learn from Professor Wright's 
 Dialect Grammar, §101, distinguished from sun by an 
 abnormal pronunciation based on the spelling, I would 
 not venture to assert that the identity of sound with sun 
 is the only cause that has led to the widespread disuse of 
 son in dialect speech, but I think it has certainly contributed 
 to the result. 
 
 These considerations seem to show that, if phonetic 
 spelling ever comes to be adopted, it will in time have 
 the effect of freeing spoken English from many of its 
 ambiguities. And even from the beginning, it will compel 
 English writers to be more careful than they have been 
 to avoid the use of expressions that would be obscure, or 
 suggestive of ludicrously irrelevant ideas, if read aloud. 
 The punster, it may be remarked in passing, will find his 
 opportunities greatly restricted. The late William James 
 somewhere speaks of certain tendencies having been ' not 
 only dammed up, but damned up ' ; and a Roman Catholic 
 newspaper lately headed an article with the words, ' Know 
 Popery '. Under the reign of phonetic spelling such 
 freaks as these would become impossible. 
 
 Inasmuch as the chief cause of the production of 
 homophones is phonetic change, and this process is con- 
 stantly going on, we may expect that many words that 
 are now different in sound will some day be pronounced 
 alike. The influence of the written language, even 
 at present, is some check on the rapidity of change of 
 pronunciation. What are called ' spelling- pronunciations ' 
 (the bugbear of pedantic phoneticians) have often come 
 into general use, with the result of restoring valuable 
 
26 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 distinctions which the language had lost. The beneficial 
 conservative influence of orthography would be greatly- 
 increased by a change that would make it possible to 
 appeal to the spelling of a word as the standard of its 
 correct pronunciation. 
 
 ' There is yet another respect in which the reform of 
 English spelling on phonetic principles would have a 
 powerful, and in the end beneficial, effect on the language. 
 One of the gravest faults of English is what Jespersen 
 has aptly called the ' undemocratic ' character of a large 
 part of its literary vocabulary. A vast number of the 
 words that are freely used in literature are alien to the 
 speech of the multitude, and fully intelligible only to those 
 who are familiar with the import of the Latin or Greek 
 words from which they are formed. As I have already 
 shown, these ' undemocratic ' terms belong primarily to 
 the written language : it is on the resemblance of their 
 customary written form to the written form of Latin or 
 Greek words that their mental effect depends. If their 
 spelling were materially changed, the motive for using 
 them would be gone, and multitudes of them would 
 become obsolete. Undoubtedly much temporary incon- 
 venience would result ; where writer and reader are both 
 classically educated, words of this sort are often, by virtue 
 of the literary reminiscences they suggest, far more effective 
 than any substitutes could be. Yet the use of such words, 
 and still more the practice of inventing them freely for 
 occasional needs, is a symptom of disease. A language 
 is not in a healthy condition when a large part of its 
 literary vocabulary can be perfectly understood only by 
 the aid of foreign tongues. The universal adoption of 
 phonetic spelling would do something to free our language 
 from its unnatural bondage to the alien, to compel the 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 27 
 
 development of its native resources, and to revive its 
 decayed powers of composition and derivation. 
 
 It has not been commonly urged among the arguments 
 for phonetic spelling that it will bring in its train a reform 
 of the English language. And, indeed, the argument 
 would be a dangerous one. For the direct operation of 
 the change would consist solely in demolition, which 
 would create needs that would have to be supplied by 
 reconstruction. Perhaps our remote posterity might find 
 cause to crown with flowers the statues of the spelling 
 reformers of to-day ; but the lot of the generations 
 between would not in all things be enviable. 
 
 It may be that there are tendencies at work that will 
 bring about the supersession of the present literary 
 vocabulary by one that will rest on the sound foundation 
 of the oral vernacular. If so, the time may come when 
 the spelling of English can, with no loss but with abundant 
 gain, be brought into perfect accord with its pronunciation. 
 
 In conclusion, I will briefly summarize the chief 
 propositions maintained in this paper. 
 
 1. Speech and writing are two organs for the expression 
 of meaning, originally co-ordinate and mutually inde- 
 pendent. 
 
 2. This dual system involved an intolerable burden on 
 the memory. It was needful that the two organs should 
 be put into mutual relation, so that the spoken and the 
 written symbol of every idea could be inferred each from 
 the other. This ideal could be realized only through 
 phonetic spelling: by making writing the bondslave of 
 speech. 
 
 3. But writing, in its primitive freedom, was in some 
 ways a better organ than speech. The eye perceives 
 symbols simultaneously; the ear perceives sounds only 
 
28 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 in succession. Mental reading was thus a quicker process 
 than hearing. Besides, the ideograph sometime j conveyed 
 Its meaning more vividly than the spoken word. 
 
 4. Writing, when enslaved to speech, lost these advan- 
 tages. But even when a language continues to be 
 phonetically written, the practised reader contrives, 
 during the process of silent reading, to loosen the fetters 
 in which the slave is bound. He acquires the habit of 
 forgetting for the moment the phonetic value of the letters, 
 and using the written word as an unanalysed symbol of the 
 spoken word, and sometimes as a pure ideograph. For 
 him, writing tends to revert to its primitive function of 
 direcdy expressing meaning.^ 
 
 5. Hence, when a language undergoes change of 
 pronunciation, the old spelling, now become phonetically 
 incorrect, is often retained. In the mind of the man 
 accustomed to reading, the written form becomes part of 
 the essence of a word. For him the best spelling of a word 
 is the usual one, because it enables him most quickly to 
 identify the word, and has acquired direct association with its 
 meaning. It does not matter to him that the individual 
 letters do not correspond to the individual sounds of which 
 the words are composed. And when change of pronuncia^ 
 tion has made a spoken word ambiguous, the retention of 
 the old unequivocal written form is a great practical 
 convenience. It makes the written language, so far, 
 a better instrument of expression than the spoken 
 language. 
 
 6. The great purpose of written language is to convey 
 meaning. Under modern conditions, it does this by two 
 different processes, inextricably combined ; by suggesting 
 
 ' One might almost say that writing retains a grateful memory of its 
 earlier days : it hankers after ' the fleshpots of Egypt '. 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 29 
 
 words of the spoken tongue, and by recalling the 
 associations which habit has attached to the written form 
 of words. As to the former point, it is the spoken word 
 as a whole that is significant ; and this is suggested more 
 quickly by a familiar written form than by an unfamiliar 
 one, even though phonetically more accurate. If we bear 
 these things in mind, we shall cease to regard the history 
 of English spelling as a story of nothing but blundering 
 and stupid and indolent conservatism. 
 
 7. Among peoples in which many persons write and 
 read much more than they speak and hear, the written 
 language tends to develop more or less independently of 
 the spoken language. In English, owing to historical 
 causes, this process has gone farther than in other lan- 
 guages, so that we have the unique phenomenon of a 
 literary vocabulary of which a large part has no connexion 
 with the oral vernacular, but has been developed in writing 
 by the process of transcribing the written forms of words 
 of foreign languages. Many of the words so formed 
 have come into popular oral use, but a vast number of 
 them are hardly ever pronounced except in reading 
 aloud. 
 
 8. Owing partly to this strange inversion of the normal 
 relation between speech and alphabetic writing, and 
 partly to the abundance of homophones in the language, 
 English is far more unsuited than other European tongues 
 to be written phonetically. 
 
3° 
 
 NOTE ON SPELLING REFORM 
 
 For many persons, the sole interest of the questions dis- 
 cussed in the foregoing paper lies in their possible bearing on 
 the problem of the reform of English spelling. I must therefore 
 expect to meet with adverse criticism on the ground that my 
 own attitude with regard to this problem has not been indicated 
 with sufficient distinctness. It will, indeed, be evident to 
 every reader that I am opposed to any radical change based 
 on purely phonetic principles ; and, on the other hand, I have 
 expressed my conviction that our existing system urgently 
 needs improvement. But it may be complained that I have 
 not given any notion of the extent of the changes that I desire 
 to see introduced, nor pointed out any plan for meeting the 
 enormous difficulties which (as my whole argument has shown) 
 stand in the way of procuring acceptance for any extensive 
 scheme of reform. 
 
 Now I must confess that my views as to what may ultimately 
 be possible and desirable in the way of reform are exceedingly 
 vague, and I see no use in attempting to render them more 
 definite. The right policy for reformers is at first to confine 
 the attack to those points of the present system for which 
 there is no defence but custom. They will find it quite hard 
 enough to secure acceptance for unquestionable improvements, 
 without adding to their difficulties by prematurely insisting on 
 reforms that promise merely a doubtful balance of gain over loss. 
 A permanendy satisfactory system of orthography must be 
 a compromise between conflicting needs, and must be a growth 
 rather than an invention. When a real victory is gained in the 
 first stage, lessons will have been learned that will make it 
 easier to see in what direction our subsequent efforts are most 
 likely to be successful. 
 
 Much depends on beginning at the right place. If we were 
 to say that the first reforms to be attempted are those which, 
 if accomplished, would gi^fe the greatest measure of relief. 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 31 
 
 the consequence would be that we must begin with proper 
 names. The unphonetic spelling of surnames and place-names 
 causes constant trouble and annoyance to all of us, even to 
 those whom the other anomalies of English spelling do not 
 inconvenience at all. But it is just here that reform is most 
 evidently impossible ; so evidently, that the London Simplified 
 Spelling Society (whose scheme, though far from being 
 accurately phonetic, aims at subjecting the orthography of 
 every English word to exceptionless rules) has decided to leave 
 the customary spelling of all proper names unaltered. The 
 reason is unmistakable. A proper name obviously consists of 
 a particular set of sounds and a particular written form. If 
 the spelling is altered, the identity of the name is (usually) 
 destroyed. To speak only of surnames, Spenser and Spencer, 
 Gray and Grey, Phipps and Fipps, Cholmondeley and Chumley, 
 Wild, Wilde, Wyld, and Wylde are distinct names, denoting 
 different sets of persons. Although it is in proper names that 
 the practical inconvenience of unphonetic spelling is at its 
 worst, the reformer cannot meddle with them without doing 
 more mischief than good. 
 
 For very similar reasons, those literary and scientific words 
 which have no oral currency — which are hardly ever pro- 
 nounced, though widely known in their written form — ought, 
 in the main, to retain their present spelling unaltered.* A few 
 general improvements, such as the dropping of the misleading 
 silent e in the suffix -ive, may be adopted with advantage. But 
 for many of our literary and scientific words it is a reform of 
 pronunciation, and not of spelling, that is really needed. 
 Sir James Murray has ventured to recommend that an effort 
 should be made to restore the pronunciation of the p in the 
 
 1 It is, for the most part, not in these words that the greatest difficulties 
 of our spelling consist. The uneducated, no doubt, often blunder over 
 them ; but to persons unaccustomed to mental effort, unfamiliar poly- 
 syllables would continue to give trouble even if they were spelt phoneti- 
 cally. 
 
32 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 initial combination fis} I believe the counsel to be good, and 
 there are probably other points in which the same principle 
 might be usefully applied. 
 
 Spelling reform, therefore, must in the main be confined to the 
 words that are primarily oral ; and even with regard to these, the 
 existing distinctions between homophones must be preserved. 
 Subject to this restriction, it is desirable that the spelling of all 
 primarily oral words should represent the pronunciation as cor- 
 rectly as the general structure of the traditional orthography will 
 permit. It must be remembered, however, that the pronunciation 
 of educated speakers is not uniform. A mode of spelling which 
 is correctly phonetic for the Londoner, who makes no difference 
 in sound between lord and laud, court and caught, morning and 
 mourning, will be unphonetic for perhaps nine-tenths of the 
 English-speaking world. A reformed spelling for general use, 
 so far as it attempts to be phonetic, must provide for all 
 traditional distinctions of sound that are still preserved by 
 educated speakers of the language anywhere. Those whose 
 speech confuses sounds that other educated speakers keep 
 apart must submit to the inconvenience of using an ortho- 
 graphy which renders one sound by different symbols, which 
 they are not allowed to treat as interchangeable. 
 
 The reform that is most imperatively needed is one which 
 will ensure that no two English words that are differently 
 pronounced shall be spelt alike. There can be no sufifi- 
 cient excuse for the retention of the many spellings which 
 are more ambiguous than the spoken forms of the words. 
 The task of rectifying these anomalies, and of making the 
 many readjustments which their correction will render necessary, 
 will require great ingenuity and thought. The solution of this 
 
 ' This counsel was intended to apply only to such literary and 
 scientific words as have no independent currency in the spoken language. 
 It would be as absurd to pronounce the p in psalm as to pronounce 
 the /. Some reviewers (perhaps excusably) have misunderstood me on 
 this point. 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 33 
 
 problem, in a manner likely to be generally satisfactory, should 
 be the first object to occupy attention. 
 
 It is not easy to devise any effective means of inducing the 
 public to accept even the limited scheme of reform which 
 I have outlined. The disturbing effect of unfamiliar spelling 
 on the reader is greater than is often supposed. I myself, 
 though the nature of my work has made me more at home 
 than most people with the orthography of former periods of 
 English, find that when I read a philological work in which 
 reformed spelling is used I am somewhat less quick in appre- 
 hending the force of an argument or the import of a statement 
 than if the book were written in the accustomed way. The 
 ordinary reader will certainly be disposed to turn away from 
 a book which is full of words that seem to him to be grotesquely 
 spelt. (He may sometimes find the oddities amusing, but they 
 will divert his attention from the substance of the writing, and 
 will soon cease to attract.) An author, whether he is one who 
 has something that he wishes to tell the world, or one who 
 lives by his writings, will not willingly limit the circle of his 
 readers by indulging in orthographical eccentricities. It is 
 noteworthy that even Professor Skeat, one of the most 
 impassioned advocates of reformed spelling, seems never, in 
 his published writings, to have ventured to spell any single word 
 otherwise than in the conventional fashion, nor, if I may judge 
 from his many letters to me, did he do so in his correspondence. 
 It would be interesting to know how many of the members of 
 the Simplified Spelling Society make much practical use of the 
 'simplified spelling'. Perhaps, if the advocates of reform 
 would abandon their far-reaching and impracticable schemes, 
 and come to agreement on a few proposals worthy of immediate 
 adoption, they might be able to induce one or two influential 
 newspapers to use the amended orthography. If this could 
 be done, the new forms would soon become familiar to 
 a large number of readers, and the ultimate victory of 
 a valuable first instalment of reform would be assured. 
 
34 SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 
 
 Many persons, whose opinion is entitled to respect, have 
 maintained that as soon as a system of reformed spelling has 
 been framed which commends itself to the judgement of 
 philologists, it should forthwith be taught in schools, without 
 waiting for it to obtain general acceptance or even toleration. 
 Under present conditions, the result of this procedure would 
 be to send out from our schools a multitude of young people 
 who, in the opinion of their elders, would be unable to spell 
 correctly. I cannot but think that the adoption of such 
 a course would be a serious mistake. The introduction of an 
 accurate phonetic notation into school use is a very different 
 matter, and I am inclined to believe that it is in this direction 
 that we must look for the solution of our present difficulties. 
 It will be objected that I am proposing to add a new burden to 
 the already too heavy load which children and teachers have 
 to bear. But some very able teachers have given it as the 
 result of their experience that children who are taught to read 
 by means of a phonetic alphabet actually learn the current 
 spelling more quickly than those who are taught in the old 
 way; and, provided that the teacher has adequate phonetic 
 knowledge, I see no reason why this may not be true. In the 
 teaching of pronunciation — a branch of education hitherto too 
 much neglected^t would obviously be a great advantage to be 
 able to exhibit graphically the difference between what the 
 learner ought to say and what he actually does say. But in 
 order that it may remain efficient, the phonetic alphabet ought 
 to be rigorously confined to its proper function of representing 
 sounds. A serious mistake of method has been committed by 
 many phoneticians, through failure to distinguish between two 
 things that greatly differ — a reformed spelling for general usej 
 and a phonetic notation intended to teach correct pronunciation 
 and the analysis of speech sounds. Those whose aim it is to 
 bring into use a reformed spelling (even one that is intended 
 to be phonetically accurate) are acting wisely when they employ 
 it in the printing of connected texts that will be intrinsically 
 
SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH 35 
 
 interesting to the reader, and when they encourage their pupils 
 to use the reformed spelling in their own compositions. The 
 object is to render the pupil so familiar with the new ortho- 
 graphy that he may be able to use it freely for the ultimate 
 purposes of reading and writing — the apprehension and 
 expression of meaning. When this familiarity is attained, the 
 reader will have come to identify the words before him by 
 their general effect, without troubling much whether he pro- 
 nounces the successive letters correctly or not ; and the writer 
 will use the prescribed spelling, even though it does not agree 
 with his own pronunciation. If he is in the habit of misplacing 
 his aspirates in speech, he must nevertheless put the h in its 
 proper place when he writes. There will be no harm in this : 
 an orthography intended for general purposes must be more or 
 less conventional. But a phonetic notation of which the 
 representation of sound is the ultimate object must be treated 
 quite differently. If it is allowed to be used for 'the appre- 
 hension and expression of meaning ' its value will be greatly 
 impaired. The learner should never be suffered to write a word 
 in the phonetic script unless he has first pronounced it correctly. 
 If thus restricted to its proper use, a phonetic alphabet will be 
 a valuable aid in the teaching of spoken as distinguished from 
 literary English. Of such teaching there has in general been 
 very little in our schools, and this neglect has done much to 
 strengthen the tendency, already powerful, to regard the spoken 
 tongue as a sort of annex to the written language. It is only 
 by sound phonetic instruction that this fallacy can be corrected. 
 A generation of people who had learned at school to analyse 
 correctly the sounds of speech, and to observe how far, and 
 from what causes, the existing spelling comes short of repre- 
 senting the pronunciation, would certainly consider the question 
 of reform with less of irrational prejudice and greater insight 
 into the conditions of the problem than is at present commonly 
 to be found. 
 
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 AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 

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