American Language (78 page)

The trouble with the others was that they were either too uncouth to be adopted without a long struggle or likely to cause errors in pronunciation. To the first class belonged
tung
for
tongue, ruf
for
rough, batl
for
battle
and
abuv
for
above
, and to the second such
forms as
each
for
catch
and
troble
for
trouble
. The result was that the whole reform received a setback: the public dismissed the reformers as a pack of lunatics. Twelve years later the National Education Association revived the movement with a proposal that a beginning be made with a very short list of reformed spellings, and nominated the following twelve changes by way of experiment:
tho, altho, thru, thruout, thoro, thoroly, thoro
]
are, program, prolog, catalog, pedagog
and
decalog
. Then, in 1906, came the organization of the Simplified Spelling Board, with a subsidy of $15,000 a year from Andrew Carnegie (later increased to $25,000 a year), and a formidable list of members and collaborators, including Henry Bradley, F. I. Furnivall, C. H. Grandgent, W. W. Skeat, T. R. Lounsbury and F. A. March. The board at once issued a list of 300 revised spellings, new and old, and in August, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered their adoption by the Government Printing Office. But this effort to hasten matters aroused widespread opposition, and in a little while the spelling reform movement was the sport of the national wits. The Government Printing Office resisted, and so did most of the departments, and in the end the use of the twelve new spellings was confined to the White House. Not many American magazines or newspapers adopted them, and they were seldom used in printing books. When, in 1919, Carnegie died, his subsidy ceased,
³⁶
and since then the Simplified Spelling Board has moved from the glare of Madison avenue, New York, to the rural retirement of Lake Placid, and there has been a serious decline in its activities. During Carnegie’s lifetime it issued a great many bulletins and circulars, but since 1924 it has published nothing save a small magazine called
Spelling —
three issues in 1925 and four in 1931.
³⁷
In its heyday the board claimed that 556 American newspapers and other periodicals, with a combined circulation 18,000,000, were using the twelve simplified spellings of the National Education Association’s list and “most of the 300 simpler spellings” recommended by its own first list, and that 460 universities, colleges and normal-schools
were either using most of these spellings “in their official publications and correspondence,” or permitting “students to use them in their written work.”
³⁸
But not many of these publications or educational institutions were of much importance. The
Literary Digest
led the very short list of magazines of national circulation, and the Philadelphia
North American
led the newspapers. With regard to the colleges, the situation in Massachusetts was perhaps typical. Three institutions had adopted the new spelling — Clark College, Emerson College and the International Y.M.C.A. College. But Harvard was missing, and so were the Massachusetts Tech, Wellesley, Smith and Boston University.

The board issued various lists of reformed spellings from time to time, and in 1919 it brought out a Handbook of Simplified Spelling summarizing its successive recommendations. They were as follows:

Obviously, this list was too long to have much chance of being accepted quickly. Some of the spellings on it, to be sure, were already in good American usage, brought in by Webster, but others were uncouth and even ridiculous. Worse, there were many exceptions to the rules laid down — for example, in rules 1, 4, 6, 12, 14, 15 and 21. The board, as if despairing of making any headway with so many words, brought out simultaneously a much shorter list, and leaflets arguing for it were distributed in large numbers. It was as follows:

On the reverse of this leaflet was the following:

But this list also failed to win any considerable public support. On the contrary, its clumsy novelties gave the whole spelling reform movement a black eye. In the Summer of 1921 the National Education Association, which had launched the campaign for reform in 1898, withdrew its endorsement, and during the years following most of the magazines and newspapers that had adopted its twelve new spellings went back to the orthodox forms. So long ago as 1909, when W. H. Taft succeeded Roosevelt as President, the New York
Sun
announced the doom of the movement in an editorial of one word:
thru
. This was somewhat premature, for Carnegie’s money was still paying for a vigorous propaganda, but his death ten years later, as I have said, put an end to large-scale crusading, and since then spelling reform has been promoted mainly by individuals, no two of whom agree. Some of their schemes are extremely simple — for example, that of William McDevitt, a San Francisco bookseller, who simply drops out all the neutral vowels and silent consonants. Thus,
the
becomes
th, writer
is
riter, because
is
becaus, would
is
woud
, and
after
is
aftr
. Other current proposals involve changes in the values of the alphabet, and are thus more complicated. Dr. H. Darcy Power, an English-born professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany, proposes that
x, c
and
q
, which are redundant, be given the new values of
th, ch
and
qw
respectively, and that the different values of the vowels be indicated by drawing lines either above or below them,
e.g., ā
for the
a
in hate,
a
for that in
car
, and
a
without any mark for that in
bat
. In order to distinguish between the two sounds of
th
he proposes that
x
be used in
thy
and
x
in
thigh
. The neutral vowel he disposes of by either dropping it altogether or displacing it with an apostrophe. Here is a specimen of his
fonetic
speling
, prepared by himself: