FORTUNE IN REFORM SPELLING.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1984, 16 April 1906, Page 7

FORTUNE IN REFORM SPELLING.

: SAVING IN TIME AT SCHOOL. | WOULD BE AT LEAST A !' YEAR.' ' Reform spelling would save the English-speaking world more than £20,000.000 annually, say the scientific orthographers, if it were to be substituted for the traditional way of putting letters together. More than 4,000,000,000 written communications pass through the mails in a single year, and one-sixth of all tliis work is superfluous, because reform spelling would do away with it. A child in the public school has to spend two years before it can get the hang of our present irregular spelling, and, not counting the time lost, this is an expense of several million pounds in teachers' salaries, and it is an obstacle for the immigrants who settle here to learn the language. The average, time allotted to spelling, reading and dictating in the school is :52.2 per cent, of the time devoted to general instruction. A child attending school for eight years expends 2,320 school hours in these exercises. At least 720 hours devoted exclusively to spelling cuiild bo done away with entirely hi the school life of a child if reform spelling were introduced. The current spelling of English contains too many superfluous and misleading letters, which greatly increase the cost of reading and writing and printing. " The removal of the silent "e's" would save 4 per cent, of all the letters on a common printed page, and the removal of one consonant of each pair of duplicated consonants would save 1.6 per cent.