CAN WE SPELL AS WE LIKE ?

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13277, 8 September 1906, Page 1 (Supplement)

CAN WE SPELL AS WE LIKE ?

I BY TOHCXGA. . In one way, of course, everybody who has escaped from the schoolmaster, and who doesn't need to care whether his spelling is approved by his fellow-men or not, can spoil as lie'jolly well pleases. But similarly we can get drunk abed, bathe in our : Sunday clothes, put butter on our hair, 1 -being women-—wear low heels when everybody else is wearing high. To do these things is to brand ourselves savage. If wo mean to be a. civilised people we must, maintain the great conventions of 'civilisation, and among the greatest of all convention is that, we shall all spell in the same way. We cannot spell as we like if wo would be regarded as fairly educated and reasonably social men and women. We must spell, just as we must dress and speak, according to the mode prevalent anion'-' those around us. And phonetic spelling is inadmissible among the Englishspeaking peoples for this very reason. The moment we determine to spell as we speak our hitherto unbroken unity of tongue must begin to break. This English tongue of ours is as a great centre around which a vast world-wide civilisation is forming and organising itself. It is binding together in one language-bond the men of Britain and the men of Louisiana, the axemen of Ontario and the gumdiggers of Auckland, the settlers of Natal and the goldseekcrs of Alaska. In the world of to-day nearly 150,000,000 peop'.e can understand one another in the tongue they learned at their mother's knee; in fifty years the number should be 200,000,000; in a century more not less than 300,000,000. The Englisher can enter four continents as though he were native-born. Those born at opposite sides of the globe can speak from heart to heart as foreigners never can. If this is not the greatest triumph of the British race it is .very near to being.

It may ne asked what good it- is to mankind that populations should be multiplied or that millions should speak a language instead of thousands. No good at all —if it were merely the speaking of the same language. Every goodif that common language is accompanied by common race, common thoughts, common ideas, and common aspirations. "Let us build a tower that will reach heaven!" said the Babel-builders, in the wonderful imagery of the Great Book. " Let us not be separated, " they said in other words-; " let us remain with a common tongue, under common laws, with common ideals, and we ■will gradually construct a form of Society in which mankind shall be happy.'' This they thought, and thus a great civilisation began to rear its head. But diversity of language grew up among the different offshoots of the same stock. They differed in language ; they misunderstood each other ; they took to cutting one another's throats when they quarrelled; and there you are. Again a great civilisation rears its head. Shall it be another Tower of Babel or shall it "reach to heaven," as the Babelbuilders meant their tower to do?

! Among the 150,000,000 English-speaking 1 men of the Earth the risk of war has almost been eliminated. The wars between lis- are now recognised.as civil wars, as horrible blood-lettings in which brother strikes as orother and sons lift' their bauds against the cause of their fathers. We have ceased to think of such war as possible, and have come to think of the language as binding us together as once men were only bound by a common ruler. "King Shakespere" the Americans call the greatest writer of English, and the jocular title is a true one. For tho common tongue between us and all it means makes the unity of British and Americans incomparably closer than that between British and French-Canadians. Do we never think what it means, this common language? Across the Pacific water the strongest State in the world, almost a continent, in which are eighty millions of European people, is building one of the strongest of navies. It causes us no alarm. We do not care whether the Americans have five battleships or fifty, | excepting that we like them to have fifty. I We do not mind what coaling-stations they j pick up, and we never frown when their flag comes floating into the Waitemata.

New Zealand may be small and weak, while America is great and powerful, but even, without the Empire we are, not at their mercy, for we are blood-kin and in the language-bond. Not a New Zealander but can make his voice heard wherever Americans foregather; not an organisation in either country but is common to both ; not a book or a newspaper that together they cannot understand. If there is anything good about Peace, as all good men fondly hold and believe, there must be something good about the conditions which have slain as between British and Americans any thought or fear of War. Those conditions depend upon the common language. If British and Americans gradually drifted into two languages they would gradually cease to understand one another, would very speedily misunderstand one another, and would certainly jump at one another s throats. They used to fight when means of communication were so bad that even with the same language it was practically impossible for them to use it. They must light again if they could no longer read one another's books, and if they spoke differing dialects of the same original tongue. That is certain.

And what has this to do with Phonetics? Just this! That our language is held together intact by a spelling which ignores changes of pronunciation. If we ever succeeded in so simplifying it that it was spelt as it sounded we should immediately begin to have opposing spellings in various parts of the English world. For men are continually shifting their pronunciations, and everlastingly and always differing a little from one another. The language itself, which ignores in its spelling all these changes, is the sheet-anchor of the tongue. Speech swings to and fro, like a pendulum, over the plumbline of wr,itten language and arbitrary spelling. It seems to be flying away but it comes back. We English-speakers are 150.000,000 to-day, with all the possibilities that we have, because the Bible fixed the spelling of our tongue hard and fast, because the Prayer Book and Pilgrim's Progress, even more than Shakespere and Milton, gave to scattering Englishmen a comparatively fixed and unchangeable tongue. To spell as you pronounce is a wild delusion. A shorthand reporter struggling to translate his verbatim notes would be rapid as compared to the man who tried to read a phonetic letter from New York when he was only accustomed to receiving letters from London. And books! Their circulation would fall at once, for the so-called "standard" of English prescribed by the professors would become as ancient "Greek to the moderns.

To eject disused letters from words, once in a while, is another matter. That may or may not be good for a language, and is another question. But though we can spell just as we like if we have no love for our language, arid no, notion of it excepting that it ought to be ! made easy for foreigners to loam, if we have any notion of its value and can conceive of the effect upon the future of humanity through its being kept common to us all, we shall change our spelling as slowly as we woi'ld a guiding-light in a. dangerous*•channel.