American Language (77 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
But American spelling is plainly better than English spelling, and in the long run it seems sure to prevail. The superiority of
jail
to
gaol
is made manifest by the common mispronunciation of the latter by Americans who find it in print, making it rhyme with
coal
. Other changes also carry their own justification.
Hostler
is obviously better English, etymologically speaking, than
ostler
, and
cozy
is more nearly phonetic than
cosy. Curb
has analogues in
curtain, curdle, curfew,
curl, currant, curry, curve, curtesy, curse, currency, cursory, cur, curt
and many other common words:
kerb
has very few, and of them only
kerchief
and
kernel
are in general use. Moreover, the English themselves use
curb
as a verb and in all noun sense save that shown in
kerbstone
. Such forms as
monolog
and
dialog
still offend the fastidious, but their merit is not to be gainsaid. Nor would it be easy to argue logically against
gram, toilet, mustache, ax, caliber, gayety, gray, anesthetic, draft
and
tire
. Something may be said, even, for
chlorid, brusk, lacrimal, gage, eolian, niter, sulfite
and
phenix
,
26
which still wait for general recognition. A number of anomalies remain. The American retention of
e
in
forego
and
whiskey
is not easily explained, nor the unphonetic substitution of
s
for
z
in
fuse
, nor the persistence of the
y
in
gypsy
and
pygmy
, nor the occasional survival of a foreign form, as in
cloture
.
27
Here we have plain vagaries, surviving in spite of attack by orthographers. Webster, in one of his earlier books, denounced the
k
in
skeptic
as a “mere pedantry,” but later on he adopted it. In the same way
pygmy, gray
and
mollusk
have been attacked, but they still remain sound American. The English themselves have many more such illogical forms to account for. They have to write
offensive
and
defensive
(nouns), despite their fidelity to the
c
in
offence
and
defence
28
They hesitate to abandon
programme
, but never think of using
diagramme
or
telegramme
. Worst of all, they are inconsistent in their use of the
-our
ending, the chief glory of orthodox English orthography.
29
In American the
u
appears only in
Saviour
and then
only when the word is used in the biblical sense. In England it is used in most words of that class, but omitted from agent nouns,
e.g., ambassador, emperor
and
progenitor
, and also from various other words,
e.g., horror
and
torpor
. It is commonly argued in defense of it over there that it serves to distinguish French loan-words from words derived directly from the Latin, but Gilbert Tucker shows
30
that this argument is quite nonsensical, even assuming that the distinction has any practical utility.
Ancestor, bachelor, error, exterior, governor, metaphor, mirror, senator, superior, successor
and
torpor
all came into English from the French, and yet British usage sanctions spelling them without the
u
. On the other hand it is used in
arbour, behaviour, clangour, flavour
and
neighbour
, “which are not French at all.” Tucker goes on:
Even in
ardour, armour, candour, endeavour, favour, honour, labour, odour, parlour, rigour, rumour, saviour, splendour, tumour
and
vapour
, where the
u
has some color of right to appear, it is doubtful whether its insertion has much value as suggesting French derivation, for in the case of twelve of these words the ordinary reader would be quite certain to have in mind only the modern spelling —
ardeur, armure, candeur, faveur, honneur, labeur, odeur, rigueur, rumeur, splendeur, tumeur
and
vapeur
— which have the
u
indeed but no
o
(and why should not one of these letters be dropped as well as the other?) — while
endeavour, parlour
and
saviour
come from old French words that are themselves without the
u
—
devoir, parleor
and
saveor
. The
u
in all these words is therefore either useless or positively misleading. And finally in the case of
colour, clamour, fervour, humour, rancour, valour
and
vigour
, it is to be remarked that the exact American orthography actually occurs in old French! “Finally,” I said, but that is not quite the end of British absurdity with these
-our -or
words. Insistent as our transatlantic cousins are on writing
arbour, armour, clamour, clangour, colour, dolour, flavour, honour, humour, labour, odour, rancour, rigour, savour, valour, vapour
and
vigour
, and “most unpleasant” as they find the omission of the excrescent
u
in any of these words, they nevertheless make no scruple of writing the derivatives in the American way —
arboreal, armory, clamorous, clangorous, colorific, dolorous, flavorous, honorary, humorous, laborious, odorous, rancorous, rigorous, savory, valorous, vaporize
and
vigorous —
not inserting the
u
in the second syllable of any one
of these words. The British practice is, in short and to speak plainly, a jumble of confusion, without rhyme or reason, logic or consistency; and if anybody finds the American simplification of the whole matter “unpleasant,” it can be only because he is a victim of unreasoning prejudice against which no argument can avail.
If the
u
were dropped in
all
derivatives, the confusion would be less, but it is retained in many of them, for example,
colourable, favourite, misdemeanour, coloured
and
labourer
. The derivatives of
honour
exhibit clearly the difficulties of the American who essays to write correct English.
Honorary, honorarium
and
honorific
drop the
u
, but
honourable
retains it. Furthermore, the English make a distinction between two senses of
rigor
. When used in its pathological sense (not only in the Latin form of
rigor mortis
, but as an English word) it drops the
u
; in all other senses it retains the
u
.
In Canada the two orthographies, English and American, flourish side by side. By an Order-in-Council of 1890, official correspondence must show the English spelling, and in 1931 the Canadian Historical Association, the Canadian Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Canada joined in urging its use by every loyal Canadian.
31
But though it is ordained in all the
-our
words in “Preparation of Copy For the Printer,” issued by the King’s Printer at Ottawa,
32
there are, in that pamphlet, various other concessions to American usage. The English
aluminium
, for example, is to be used in scientific documents, but the American
aluminum
is permitted in commercial writing.
Cipher, dryly, jail, net, program
and
wagon
are to be spelt in the American manner, and even
alright
is authorized. Nearly all the Canadian newspapers use the American spelling and it is also taught in most of the public schools, which are under the jurisdiction, not of the Dominion government, but of the provincial ministers of education. In Australia the English spelling is official, but various American forms are making fast progress. According to the
Triad
(Sydney), “horrible American inaccuracies of spelling are coming into common use” in the newspapers out there; worse, the educational authorities of Victoria authorize the use of the American
-er
ending. This last infamy has been roundly denounced by Sir Adrian Knox, Chief Justice of the Commonwealth, and the
Triad
has displayed a good deal of colonial passion in supporting
him. “Unhappily,” it says, “we have no English Academy to guard the purity and integrity of the language. Everything is left to the sense and loyalty of decently cultivated people.” But even the
Triad
admits that American usage, in some instances, is “correct.” It is, however, belligerently faithful to the
-our
ending. “If it is correct or tolerable in English,” it argues somewhat lamely, “to write
labor
for
labour
, why not
boddy
for
body, steddy
for
steady
, and
yot
for
yacht?
” Meanwhile, as in Canada, the daily papers slide into the Yankee orbit.
Franklin’s “Scheme For a New Alphabet and Reformed Mode of Spelling” was by no means the first attempt to revise and rationalize English orthography. So long ago as the beginning of the Thirteenth Century a monk named Ormin tried to reform the spelling of the Middle English of his time. The chief difficulty then encountered was in distinguishing between long vowels and short ones, and Ormin proposed to get rid of it by doubling the consonants following the latter. Thus he spelled
fire, fir
, and
fir, firr
. His proposal got no support, and the manuscript in which he made it lay in obscurity for six centuries, but when it was exhumed at last it turned out to be very useful to philologians, for it threw a great deal of light upon early Middle English pronunciation. Thus, the fact that Ormin spelled
God
as we do showed that the word was then rhymed with
load
, and the fact that he spelled
goddspell
(gospel) with two
d
’s showed that a shorter
o
was beginning to prevail in the derivative.
Ormin was followed after three and a half centuries by Sir John Cheke (1514–57), the first regius professor of Greek at Cambridge. Middle English had passed out by that time, and Modern English was in, but many survivals of the former were still encountered, including a host of now-useless final
e
’s. Sir John proposed to amputate all of them. He also proposed to differentiate between the short and long forms of the same vowels by doubling the latter. Finally, he proposed to get rid of all silent consonants, thus making
doubt
, for example,
dout
, and turning
fault
into
faut
, for it was so pronounced at that time.
33
Cheke was supported in his reforms by a
number of influential contemporaries, including Roger Ascham, but English went on its wild way. In 1568 another attempt to bring it to rule was made by Sir Thomas Smith, one of his friends and colleagues at Cambridge. Smith’s proposals were published in a Latin work entitled “De Recta et Emendata Linguæ Anglicanæ Scriptione,” and the chief of them was that the traditional alphabet be abandoned and a phonetic alphabet substituted. A century later the Rev. John Wilkins, then Dean of Ripon and later Bishop of Chester, came forward with another phonetic alphabet — this time of about 450 characters! But though Wilkins argued for it very learnedly on physiological grounds, printing many engravings to show the action of the tongue and palate, it seems to have made no impression on his contemporaries, and is now forgotten save by antiquarians. Nor was any greater success made by his numerous successors. They framed some very apt and pungent criticisms of English orthography and projected a number of quite reasonable reforms, but they had little hand in the determination of actual spelling practise. That was mainly the work of printers, and after 1650 their rules began to be accepted by English authors, and most of them remain in force to this day.
34
Since Franklin’s time the literature of the subject has taken on large proportions, and contributions to it have been made by all sorts of persons, ranging from scientific philologians to fanatics of the sort who project new religions and new political economies.
35
In the last century the most noise was made by Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of the system of shorthand bearing his name. In the early 40’s, in association with Alexander J. Ellis, he proposed a new phonetic alphabet of forty letters, and during the years following
he made vigorous propaganda for it in his
Phonographic Journal
, and through the Phonetic Society, which he organized in 1843.
But the real father of the Simplified Spelling movement was probably Noah Webster. The controversy over his new spelling, described in the last section, aroused a great deal of public interest in the subject, and in the early 70’s even the dons of the American Philological Association began to give it some attention. In 1875 they appointed a committee consisting of Professors Francis A. March of Lafayette College, W. D. Whitney and J. Hammond Trumbell of Yale, S. S. Haldeman of the University of Pennsylvania, and F. J. Child of Harvard to look into it, and in 1876 this committee reported that a revision of spelling was urgent and that something should be done about it. Specifically, they proposed that eleven new spellings be adopted at once, to wit,
ar, catalog, definit, gard, giv, hav, infinit, liv, tho, thru
and
wisht
. During the same year there was an International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography at Philadelphia, with several delegates from England present, and out of it grew the Spelling Reform Association, which immediately endorsed the eleven new spellings of the five professors. Three years later a similar body was organized in England, with A. H. Sayce, deputy professor of comparative philology at Oxford as its president, and Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, Sir Isaac Pitman, Sir John Lubbock, and such eminent philologians as J. A. H. Murray, W. W. Skeat and Henry Sweet among its vice-presidents. The Philological Society of England and the American Philological Association kept a friendly watch upon the progress of events. In 1880 the former issued a pamphlet advising various “partial corrections of English spellings,” and in 1886 the latter followed with recommendations affecting about 3500 words, and falling under ten headings. Most of the new forms listed had been put forward years before by Webster, and some of them had entered into unquestioned American usage in the meantime,
e.g.
, the deletion of the
u
from the
-our
words, the substitution of
er
for
re
at the end of words, and the reduction of
traveller
to
traveler
.