SIMPLIFIED SPELLING

New Zealand Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 6053, 10 November 1906, Page 3

SIMPLIFIED SPELLING

(From Our Special Correspondent.) LONDON, September 28.

Mr Bernard Shaw is always intcr<Mtiug, and his contribution to the simplified spelling discussion started by President Reenovelt, makes good reading. In the course of a letter to the ‘■Times'’ Mr Shaw points out that though the President doca not overrate the enormous importance of spelling reform, his methods cannot be regarded as an advance on those of Artemus Ward and Jcfih Billings. Tho Roosevelt spelling is not rosily a. simplified spoiling: it is a shortened spelling, which is quire a different matter, as a short spelling may leave a foreigner or a child quite as much in the dark ivi to tho sound of a word as a long one. .■Moreover, the Roosevelt spelling anxiously disclaims any pretence to to phonetic, but as Mr Shaw observes, wo cannot get away from phonetic spelling, ‘'because spelling is as nocossariljr and inevitably phonetic as mointnro is damp.” -When we begin by refusing to spell aa we pronounce we end by having to 'pronounce as wo spoil,” declares Mr Shaw. Ho instances tho history of tho words “oblige” and “envelope,” and continues: "As the working classes become literate and please themselves by dragging into ordinary conversation more and more long won];, which they have never heard pixmounced, they introduce* ways of their own of pronouncing them, founded necessarily on tho spelling. Programme, a vulgarism which offondsi the eye as Paris pronounced Pare*; in English oifends 11 10 ear, has been in my hearing pronounced so as to rhyme to damn me. That is lion- wo .shall all have to pronounce :t sonic day. I foresee the time when i shall bo forced to pronounco semieoiisiciniiH as ‘see my conscious.’ Then .hero is the inarch of preciosity. Already I blush v hen old habit betrays mo into calling clothes cloze. I have heard a tenor pronouncing the 1 in Handel's ‘Where e’er you walk.’ If Retford has become Depped Ford in nplto of usage, I see no reason to doubt that clot will presently become debbed. I am fond of the word ham, meaning a country place larger than a hamlet. I am still allowed to speak of East Ham and West 1 fan:. because tho words are written separately; but when I speak of Lewis Ham, Eft Ham, or Peters Ham, I am suspected of a defect in my speech, almost as if I had fipokeu of Cans Haiton (properly rhyming to Walton) instead of Tver Shalltn. Tho received pronunciations nowadays are Louis Sham, Peter Sham, L. Them, and so on. And tho people who support tho bad spelling which is corrupting tho language in this fashion ’pretend to have a special regard for it, and prattle of tire Bible and Shakespeare! They remind mo of a New York Police Commissioner who onco arrested a whole theatrical company for performing one of my playo, and explained, on being remonstrated with, that tho Sermon on the Mount was good enough for him.” Mir Shaw’s remedy for the eccentricities of English spelling is a drastic one. He wants new letters added to the alphabet until our consonants and vowels aro for all practical purposes separately represented. Tho new letters must bo “designed by an artist with a fully developed sense of beauty in writing and printing.” By the invention, of these additional letters wo should got, he says, “a word notation which may be strange at first (which does not matter), but which will be neither ludicrous nor apparently ignorant (which does, matter very much).” But I fear Mr Shaw will have to sigh, in vain for his new sound-symbols.