SPELLING REFORM.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXXIII, Issue 15923, 8 May 1912, Page 8

SPELLING REFORM.

Thb lady who writes to us to-day to urge the claims of a simplified system of spelling makes out a strong case for a reform that would lighten the burdens of the British race. She has been careful to disregard most of the objections that have been raised to every scheme that has been put forward during the last hundred years for the remodelling of English orthography, but she has mentioned quite the most important of them. The consummation of spelling reform has been hindered, as the progress of every reform worth striving for has been, by sentiment, and it is little more than a rather intangible historical bogey that has prevented us from listening to the pleadings of our commousense. The abolition; of the curious hotch-potch of rules and exceptions that controls the spelling of our written language would make for plain, practical utility, and moreover would be entirely in keeping with the progressive development of the English tongue. It is the pride of the Englishspeaking peoples that theirs is a living language, which is being extended every day by the coining of new words and the absorption of foreign terms that are required to symbolise new thoughts and new creations. Our correspondent severely calls it a mongrel language, but it certainly is elastic and cosmopolitan, and its fidelity to archaic forms of orthography is ludicrously incongruous. Spelling, or course, has terrors for old folk as well as for school children, and even the grey heads would welcome a rational system, but it is the children, for whom our correspondent is chiefly concerned, who would reap the greatest benefits from reform. What these would bo she has'indicated in plain terms that should carry conviction even to the most biased objector. Spelling reform should be capable of achievement at the expense of a little effort. The movements in its favour have been spasmodic and necossarily ineffectual. Hr Carnegie’s unaided protest has been of little service, and probably it is not desirable that his own, or any other, predetermined method of “fonefic" spelling should be made the goal of the reformers. Tho remodelling of the written language is a task for expert hands, and they should be encouraged to undertake it.