SPELLING REFORM.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 18 February 1925, Page 10

SPELLING REFORM.

NEW RUSSIAN ALPHABET. Spelling reform, for which President Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, and many prominent American scholars struggled vainly a „dozen years ago. Inis been accomplished tor the Russian language by the Soviet Administration. The reforms in the Russian alphabet, shortening the written language by one-twelfth and making its spelling twice a,s logical, announced bv thp Russian Ministry of Eduaction, are declared by Dr. Jolm P. Harrington., ethnologist of the Smithsonian Institution, to lie of material advantage in the study of this difficult Slavic language. Dr. Harrington also pointed out that it is fortunate for Russia that this i;eform has been declared at just, this lime. ‘'Spelling reform failed in America, largely because all Americans could read and write already, and were reluctant to change what they had learned,” lie said. “But in Russia it is different. Illiteracy is still common in Russia, and the great mass of the people have nothing to unlearn. When education becomes universal among them, as if is finally bound to, it will be based on the new spelling. ‘‘The changes should effect a. saving of about four years out of the education of every Russian child,” lie says, “and they will reduce the cost of printing in Russia by something like 1.0.U00.U0R dollars a year. Rive of the letters of the alphabet have been thrown out bodily, reducing it from thirty-seven letters to thirty-two.

“The spelling of Russian has remained unaltered since it was standardised by Peter the Great and tire grammarian Lomonosov, in the eighteenth century. No change was allowed, though in many ways the orthography was most whimsical. “For instance the Russians were using two kinds of ‘e\ One w ord might require the variety of ‘c’ known as .‘ye,’ and another would call for the 'o' known as ‘yat.’ There are also two kinds of ‘l,’ one written like our own T,’ and the other like our ‘u.’ .The dotte' kind was written before a vowel, a>id the ‘double’ before a consonant. And no word was allowed to terminate, in an unpalatilised consonant, a ‘hard sign,’ as useless as the mute ‘shewn’ of Hebrew, having to he w ritten at the end. All this nonsense has been eliminated, and Russian is now the most scientifically spelled language of Europe. ‘‘The question was raised in the Minister of Education of introducing the Roman alphabet, which is the one we use in waiting English, instead of the modified Greek character in which Russian has always been written. Psychologists claim that the Roman small letters, with their * projections above and below r the line, present a contour more readily grasped by the eye than the solid blocks of Russian lower case, characters, which are all the same height and correspond to our small capitals. Thus ‘malchils.’ which is the Russian word for ‘hoy,’ in Russian type is a rectangle, while ‘boy’ in Roman type has projecting signals.’ But the advocates of retaining and ‘scientificiziug’ the Russian alphabet prevailed.” Russian is now written without the dotting of an “i” or the crossing of a “t,” which, cause the lifting of the hand from the paper in writing English.