4 The NED says that this spelling was “prevalent in the 18th c. and not uncommon in the first half of the 19th c.” but is “now obs. exc. in legal documents.”
5 Published Dec. 26.
6 Saturday Review of Literature, July 27, 1946, p. 10.
1 Topics of the Times, editorial page, Dec. 29, 1945.
2 Shaw’s Scheme Scouted, New York Times, editorial page, Jan. 14, 1946. Funk is a nephew of Dr. Isaac K. Funk (1839–1912), the publisher of the Standard Dictionary and the Literary Digest and one of the most ardent of the early supporters of the Simplified Spelling Board. But the younger Funk has never followed his uncle into the wilderness.
3 Bad Language, by William Barkley; London, 1945, p. 3. Anglic was launched by Zachrisson in the late 20s, and is described in detail in its inventor’s Anglic: a New Agreed Simplified English Spelling; final revised edition; Uppsala (Sweden), 1931. Zachrisson was professor of English at Uppsala. His proposal was reviewed somewhat tartly by Janet Rankin Aiken in Or Shall We Go Anglic?, Bookman, Feb. 1931, pp. 618–20, and by A. G. K[ennedy?] in American Speech, June, 1931, pp. 378–80. For a while he promoted it in two periodicals, Anglic, an Edukaeshonal Revue, and Anglic Illustrated. He was not the only foreigner to undertake the reform of English spelling. The scheme of the Germanized H. Darcy Power is described in AL4, pp. 404–05. In 1932 a Japanese named Y. Okakura published The Simplification of English Spelling in Tokyo.
1 And by Samuel Johnson. The word came in during the Fifteenth Century and was once spelled publyke, publike, publique, publicte and even puplicke and puplik. But public appeared in the statutes of Oxford University so early as 1645, and is to be found in Dryden, 1665. During the Eighteenth Century Jeremy Bentham, De Foe and Blackstone favored it. Noah Webster made it universal in the United States.
2 Barkley’s other publications on the subject include Ingglish, Nineteenth Century and After, May, 1938, pp. 602–15; The Two Englishes; London, 1941, and Article to End All Spelling Bees, London Daily Express, May 13, 1938. His colleagues of the Daily Express spoofed him gently by signing the last-named “by Wilyam Barkly.” “At least,” they added, “that is how our Mr. William Barkley ought to spell his name if he had his way.” The Two Englishes was noticed somewhat unfavorably in the London Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 1941, and Barkley replied on Aug. 30.
3 Supplement I, pp. 128–31.
4 The spelling-bee was promoted by Noah Webster’s famous blue-back speller, for many years the only book, save the Bible, in general circulation in the country. But the name spelling-bee, though it had congeners running back to the Revolutionary era, is not recorded until the 1870s. Before that, beginning in the 30s, spelling-class, -match or -school was used. Introduced by the radio, the spelling-bee had a brief but furious vogue in England in the late 1930s.
1 See his letter of Dec. 14, 1910, setting up the Carnegie Peace Fund, reprinted in the Saturday Review of Literature, June 1, 1946, pp. 20–21.
2 Reformers and Cranks, Spelling, July, 1892, pp. 231–32.
1 Spelling Reform From an Educational Point of View, reprinted in Spelling, May, 1887, p. 27.
2 Mr. Ed. C. Kruse, of Kansas City, tells me that in a Harmonized and Subject Reference New Testament, published at Delaware (N.J.) in 1904, the statement was made that “there are only thirty-three words in the English language pronounced as spelled.” Nothing could be more ridiculous.
3 For example, H. Johnstone Millar in the London Times, July 1, 1935. He said: “I still have correspondents from both Germany and France who hardly ever make spelling mistakes in the long letters with which they are kind enough to delight me.” See also Spelling Reform, London Times Literary Supplement, May 27, 1944, p. 259.
1 Eclectic Magazine, April, 1882, p. 571. Spelling, Sept., 1894, pp. 314–17. So recently as 1947 a conference of German teachers, publishers, writers and printers was held at Berlin to draw up a new scheme of spelling reform. Prof. Wolfgang Steinitz, a member of the preparatory committee, advocated the use of ai alone instead of both ai and ei, eu instead of äu, ss instead of sz, f in place of v and ph, ks in place of x and chs, k in place of ch when the sound is k, and the omission of h after r. See Word, Aug., 1946, p. 157.
1 A Letter on Spelling Reform, American Speech, Oct., 1945, pp. 208–11. See also “Spanish is a Phonetic Language” – the quotation marks satirize the common delusion—, by Pierre Delattre, Hispania, Nov., 1945, pp. 511–16. Morrison’s paper was questioned in Some Comments on Spelling Reform, by Mario A. Pei, American Speech, April, 1946, pp. 129–31.
2 Literary Riots, Milwaukee Sentinel, editorial, July 6, 1923.
3 The high illiteracy rate in Russia in 1924 also facilitated reform there. An article on that reform in Science, by John P. Harrington, was summarized in American Speech, Oct., 1925, pp. 60–61.
1 Leonard Bloomfield says in Language; New York, 1933, p. 86 that Polish, Czech and Finnish are spelled phonetically, but inasmuch as he adds Spanish some doubts may linger.
2 This appears on p. 8 of a 16-page pamphlet of such banal confectionery, Rimes Without Reason, issued by the Spelling Reform Association; Lake Placid (N.Y.), n.d.
3 Harper’s Magazine, Oct., 1852, p. 709.
4 I take this from the just cited pamphlet of the Spelling Reform Association, inside back cover.
1 Would Spell Fish Ghotti, New York Times, March 5, 1944. This was a report of a lecture at University College, London, by Daniel Jones.
2 Webster declared for hickup in his dictionary of 1806, and hiccup is now standard in both the United States and England.
3 This was one of the marvels of my own schooldays, but every boy or girl of nine, not half-witted, could spell it. It has been supplanted in medical terminology by tuberculosis.
4 American Speech, Jan., 1927, p. 217 says that ghoughphtheightteeaux appeared on the menu of the Lake Placid Club June 22, 1926.
5 Why not yrrh?
6 Sir Isaac Pitman’s Life and Labors, by Benn Pitman; Cincinnati, 1902, p. 83. I am indebted here to Mr. Ed. C. Kruse, of Kansas City.
7 The last three come from What a Language!, by J. Franklin Bradley, English Journal (College edition), April, 1938, pp. 349–50.
8 I take this from an article in the Youth’s Companion, reprinted in the Writer’s Monthly in 1925.
9 London, 1848, pp. 42–46.
10 I leave the discovery of the spellings parodied here to readers serving leisured terms in the jug. In the rest of the letter Gregory made due use of colonel, dough, psalm, phthisic, myrrh and sapphire. Some of his horrible examples have since acquired more rational spellings, at least in the United States, e.g., accompt, drachm and gaol.
1 AL4, pp. 381–87.
2 The full list is in AL4, pp. 401–02.
3 Recent Trends in English Linguistics, Modern Language Quarterly, June, 1940, p. 180. In the same paper, p. 181, Kennedy complains that “it is only quite recently that students of English have begun to make careful and detailed studies of important phases of the history of English spelling, and, to our shame, they have been foreign, chiefly German, students.”
1 Problems of Spelling Reform, S.P.E. Tract No. LXIII, 1944, p. 75.
2 e.g., to, too and two.
3 The English Simplified Spelling Society turns both male and mail into mael and both to sew and to sow into soe.
4 Some Anomalies of Spelling, S.P.E. Tract No. LIX, 1942, p. 331.
5 Some Anomalies of Spelling, just cited, p. 332.
1 The Dictionary of New Spelling issued by the Simplified Spelling Society duly converts cede into seed, recede into reseed or reesede, both cession and session into seshon, and fissure into fisher or fishuer.
2 Problems of Spelling Reform, before cited, p. 57. The Dictionary of New Spelling converts news into nuez, and both hues and hews into huez.
3 This is true even when the writer is a learned man. I offer, for example, a few extracts from Albrecht von Haller and English Theology, by Lawrence Marsden Price, professor of German at the Univers
ity of California, Publications of the Modern Language Association, Dec., 1926, pp. 942–54: “Shaftesbury … certainly brot the moral sense into prominence.… Haller used the same figure to express the same thot.… It is clear enuf.…”
4 The Dictionary of New Spelling makes them aek, kof, enuf, wimen, tung, shuur and bery. The Simplified Spelling Board’s Handbook of Simplified Spelling makes them ak(e), cof, enuf, tung, sure and berri. I can’t find any substitute for women on its list.
1 Simplified Spelling, London Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 1941.
2 Reforms in Spelling, London Times, Feb. 26, 1936. I am indebted here to the late F. H. Tyson, of Hong Kong. Said Louise Pound in British and American Pronunciation, School Review, June, 1915, p. 393: “If one nation and not another simplified its spelling, or if different systems for reform were adopted by the two, or if both speeches were spelled phonetically, what severance already exists would be emphasized. They would differ to the eye as they already do to the ear. The process once started might be more rapid if the anchor of fixed spelling were torn loose.”
3 On English Homophones, S.P.E. Tract No. II, 1919, p. 14.
1 Bridges listed a number of homonyms that have dropped out of English since Shakespeare’s time, e.g., neat (an ox), pill (to plunder), rede (counsel), ear (to plow) and speed (aid), and also a few that he believed were in process of passing out in 1919, e.g., cruse, clime, gambol, mien, rheum, wile, wrack and teem.
2 On English Homophones, before cited, p. 42. The most comprehensive study of homonyms is The Conflict of Homonyms in English, by Edna Rees Williams; New Haven, 1944. It is reviewed by Rudolph Willard in American Speech, Feb., 1945, pp. 61–62.
1 Sojers Shad Lite on Simpul Spallin, by Raphael Avellar, New York World-Telegram, Jan. 9, 1946.
2 Preparation of Copy for the Printer, prepared and published under the authority of F. A. Acland, King’s Printer; fifth edition; Ottawa, 1928.
3 A Note on Canadian Speech, by Morley Ayearst, American Speech, Oct., 1939, p. 232.
4. THE TREATMENT OF LOAN-WORDS
Sir William Craigie, in one of the papers I was lately quoting,4 speaks of “the universal prejudice against accents in English,” and says that “even if printers did not rebel against them they are yet distasteful and deterrent to readers out of all proportion to their complexity.” This prejudice, I believe, is even more marked in the United States than it is in England, and as a result very few American newspapers make any effort to use the correct accents on foreign words. Said the editor of the Editor & Publisher, the chief journal of the newspaper trade, in 1939:
Names like führer, Göring, Brüning become fuehrer, Goering, Bruening and so forth, while less famous names like Dürer usually become simply Durer. Cañon has been Americanized as canyon, but mañana becomes manana, not manyana, and Azaña gets into most American print as Azana, not Azanya. To Spaniards and Latin Americans, French and Germans and Scandinavians the diacritical marks are integral parts of the words, and their omission is as offensive as a gross misspelling is to an educated American. Not many newspaper offices, however, have these marks in their matrix fonts, and not many more have the time to spot them in from the pi channel, except in extraordinary circumstances.5
The Editor & Publisher apparently follows the procession, for on dipping into it at random I find blaetter in half a minute.6 I turn to the Saturday Review of Literature and find smorgasbord for the Swedish smörgåsbord.1 I turn to Variety and find it spelling the French original of its own name variete, not variété.2 I turn to – but no more examples are needed, for they are flung at the American reader in endless number. At least one American newspaper, indeed, has declared categorically that accents, like italics, are unnecessary. There was a time, it says,
when they were widely used. In the days when all type was set by hand, perhaps no great delay was occasioned by this practice, but when the type-setting machines came into general use, not to mention typewriters, both italics and accents were for the most part placed on the shelf. It would seem no possible benefit can be derived from reviving or expanding the use of accents. Few American readers will know the significance, whether it is attached to a place name or some common word in French, Spanish or whatever.3
I should add that this iconoclasm, while general, is by no means universal. The Baltimore Sunpapers, at least in theory, use the proper diacritical marks on all accented foreign words that have not been naturalized,4 and the New York Herald Tribune uses them in “art, dramatic, editorial, literary and musical copy, and the Sunday fashion page.”5 Even the Chicago Tribune, despite its long-continued attempts to inflict simplified spelling on its readers, is orthodox when it comes to foreign words, and instructs its copy-readers (with what success I do not know) to put accents on fête, façade, confrère, cortège, entrée, männerchor, portière, garçon, Maréchal Niel, Théâtre Français, Honoré and Götterdämmerung.6 The Government Printing Office favors naturalizing loans as soon as possible, and thus ordains blase, boutonniere, brassiere, cafe, crepe, debut, decollete, entree, facade, fete, melee, naive, nee, role and roue, but it still uses accents on abbé, attaché, canapé, chargé d’affaires, communiqué, déjeuner, étude, fiancée, mañana, métier, pâté, précis, résumé, risqué, señor and vis-à-vis.1 The State Department, having a great deal of correspondence with foreigners, puts accents on all of these and also on naïve.2 It uses visa instead of visé, which lingers on in England, but the French themselves have made the same change.3 In England, as I have indicated, accents are used more frequently than in the United States, but even there a movement against them is visible. So long ago as November, 1923, the Society for Pure English prepared a list of foreign words that seemed ripe for complete naturalization, and it was adopted by the London Times, the London Mercury and other high-toned publications. It included confrere, depot, levee, role and seance.4 Of these levee appeared without accents in Noah Webster’s first dictionary in 1806, and depot and seance in his American Dictionary of 1828.
412. [Dr. Louise Pound notes that a number of Latin plurals tend to become singular nouns in colloquial American.] They are to be found plentifully, in fact, upon higher levels. I have encountered data in the singular in the Congressional Record,5 in the Saturday Review of Literature,6 and in a headline in the New York Herald Tribune.7 In the Editor & Publisher I have found media used to designate one newspaper;8 in the Étude, the Bible of all small-town music teachers, I have found tympani used for one drum;9 and in Life I once found Americana used as a singular by the late William Allen White.10 Dr. Pound long ago reported that dicta, insignia, strata, criteria, curricula and phenomena were coming into use as singulars among Americans of some education,1 and since then she has added emporia, memoranda, ganglia, stimuli, literati and alumni,2 and other pathologists of speech have added propaganda,3, agenda, arcana, nebulœ, meninges, bacilli, bacteria, automata, candelabra and sanitaria. As for data it is so widespread that even Webster 1934 recognizes it, saying “although plural in form it is not infrequently used as a singular, as, This data has been furnished for study and decision.” In compensation for these barbarities there is an occasional resort to a pseudo-Latin plural, as in prospecti and octopi.4
The tendency to replace all non-English plurals with indigenous forms is not recent, but goes back many years. When halo came in during the Sixteenth Century the Latin plural halones was used, but by 1603 it had become haloes and by 1646 halos. Many respectable authorities argue that most of the surviving Latin plurals had better be dropped. In 1925, for example, Robert Bridges declared for nebulas in place of nebulœ, vortexes for vortices, gymnasiums for gynmasia and dillettantes for dilettanti, though allowing that automata and memoranda had better be retained, and forci, formulœ and indices “in their scientific sense.”5 In 1938 Carleton R. Ball6 proposed a sweep of all the surviving Latin plurals, both in scientific terminology and everyday speech, on the ground that
Learning is unlimited. Time and talent are limited. Whatever uses time and abi
lity unnecessarily is wasteful and should be avoided. Avoidable irregularity and diversity in the construction of a language make demands on time and talent that might be employed more profitably.
Some of the plurals he advocated were abscissas, antennas, lacunas, nebulas, mammas (for mammœ), diplomas (for the technical diplomata), sarcomas, traumas, lumens (for lumina), analysises, axises, parenthesises, thesises, apexes, matrixes, testatrixes, vortexes, crisises, bacteriums, honorariums, criterions, agendums, erratums,1 stratums, bacilluses, funguses, polypuses, genuses, femurs, coccuses, focuses and colossuses.2 He was unable to find plausible English plurals for caput, os, vas and corpus, and some of his inventions, e.g., synthesises and nympbeums, were somewhat clumsy, but he was confident that he was on the right track. “Let us take these logical steps,” he concluded, “in simplifying our English construction of plural nouns, and encourage others to take them. The gain will be great.” The editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association, two years later, hinted that something of the sort was afoot in their art and mystery. “The most unpopular plural for a medical writer to accept at the hands of a manuscript editor,” they said, “is the plural of epididymis, which is not epididymes but epididymides. Authors are so grudging, so reluctant, to accept this form that it betrays a bias in favor of the shorter spelling.”3 But the editors held out for epididymides, and in the same note declared that the true plural of appendicitis is appendicitides, and of bronchitis bronchitides. In their style book4 they permit appendixes, enemas, fibromas, gummas, spirochetes, serums and traumas, but insist on bronchi, criteria, foci, protozoa, sequele, stigmata and uertebre. Every now and then someone starts a crusade against loan-words that seem to be unnecessary, e.g., questionnaire, per instead of a in per year, etc.,5 but it seldom comes to anything. The changes undergone in the process of naturalization are often curious. The case of smearcase (Ger. schmierkiise) is familiar. In a travel article published in 1876 the Japanese jinricksha appears as djinricbia, geisha is guecba and samurai is samourai.6
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