Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling

by David Wolman

  SEVEN

  A FIRST CLASS MAN

  We all work together for the great majoriti on which wi ar now agrid.1

  Melvil Dewey

  IN THE SPRING OF 1902, Melvil Dewey readied himself for one of the most important dinners of his life.2 He was to meet Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate who, over the next decade, would become one of history’s most celebrated philanthropists. During his lifetime, Carnegie bankrolled the construction of thousands of public libraries across the country, donating an estimated $350 million to promote literacy and learning (that’s about $4.3 billion today).

  In a letter to Carnegie leading up to the meeting, Dewey appealed to the businessman’s interest in supporting what Carnegie called “a language commission.” Juggling grandiosity and gumption, Dewey wrote:

  I found 25 years ago the chief obstacle to getting the greatest good from public libraries was in the absurd spelling of English which…wasted three years out of the school life of every English child who goes through a full course…[T]he greatest service that can be rendered the race today at a moderate cost is the endowment or at least the support for a few years of an office where a first class man with needed clerical assistance can answer questions and conduct a wise, conservative campaign for the simplification of English spelling.

  If libraries were to really matter, reading needed to be easier. Dewey was certain that this language commission could make that happen: “In five years such an office would be so well started that its work might be turned over to the Carnegie Institution or to Columbia [University] or to some other prominent body. The best scholars of the world are agreed as to the need and as to its practicability.”3

  Born in 1851 to a Baptist family in upstate New York, Dewey was educated in his hometown of Adams Center, not far from the eastern shores of Lake Ontario, before heading to Amherst College. He was a keen student and compulsive diary keeper. From the age of fifteen he recorded in spreadsheet format his age, height, weight, and financial assets. When he was seventeen, he was caught in a fire at school. Dewey scrambled out of the building carrying a stack of books. He had inhaled such a dangerous amount of smoke that, when he subsequently came down with a cough, a local doctor said he would not survive. But Dewey recovered, and as he did he became that much more determined to never waste time, and to devote his days to a life mission of promoting “a higher education for the masses.”4

  He was just a few years out of college, working as an assistant librarian, when he devised the classification scheme for library books that would come to be known as the Dewey Decimal System. In his later years, he recalled its genesis: Listening to a church sermon, all at once “the solution flasht over me so that I jumpt in my seat and came very near shouting ‘Eureka!’ Use decimals to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.”5

  Before meeting Carnegie, Dewey, who would spend more than fifty years of his life struggling on behalf of spelling reform, must have felt immense pressure to make a convincing case. He finally had the ear of the one man who not only held similar convictions about education, but who also had unprecedented power to effect widespread change. The librarian obsessed over how to make his pitch so as “not to scare our capitalist,” as he confided to a friend. “He is a peculiar man…” and “a hard trout to get on your hook.”6

  Soon after the turn of the century, Carnegie had turned his full energies to philanthropy. When the two men met for dinner, Carnegie was, if not actively shopping for a new cause to support, at least willing to hear yet another plug for funding. The Spelling Reform Association (later called the Simplified Spelling Board), which Dewey had helped establish in 1876, was building an evermore distinguished list of supporters: legislators, educators, artists, newspaper editors, publishers, university presidents, and scholars throughout the “cuntry” and in Canada and Britain. But funding was a perpetual problem.

  There are no minutes from their initial dinner, and it would be a couple of years before Carnegie would open his checkbook. But by Dewey’s account, he had played a good hand. Writing to a colleague afterward, he reported using “all the skill and finesse possible to avoid hunting wild ducks with a brass band.” Carnegie, he added, “is more interested and more enthusiastic than ever. He says unqualifiedly that no cause he has ever helpt appeals to him so strongly.” Carnegie was in.7

  IN THE DECADES following publication of Webster’s 1828 dictionary, orthography debate fell into a relatively quiet period. Perhaps Webster’s great work was so comprehensive that people felt the language had reached a level of clarity and stability whereby it no longer needed refinement. If a source as authoritative as the dictionary accepted so many irregular spellings, maybe it was best to leave them be. Besides, there were other matters requiring attention, like Manifest Destiny and the debate over slavery that was steadily dividing the nation in two. Johnson’s dictionary had helped settle English orthography, Webster gave it some American spice, and, for the most part, the way words were spelled was a done deal.

  But not everyone had come to terms with English spelling. In 1844, Bartlomiej Beniowski, a Polish ex-pat living in London, self-published “the Anti-Absurd Alphabet.” In one sense, Beniowski’s “phrenotypic alphabet” is just one in a long string of orthographies devised by eccentrics possessing unusual patience and a particular compulsion for ordering things that strike them as disorderly. What makes Beniowski’s plan stick out, however, is its tantrum tenor. He allocates more than half of the entire volume to rant about “tyrannically ridiculous nonsense,” “nonsensical ridiculosities,” and “INCUBUS-LIKE ABSURDITIES” of the English alphabet (his caps), and to lambaste the “chicken-headed” people who defend it. The ridiculosities include the fact that a “represents four sounds as different from one another as black from white, yellow, or green; witness ape, arm, apple, all,” and that f “is called ef, but, in the word ‘of ’ which meets the eye at every moment of our existence, f is to be pronounced v; thus write of, read ov. Besides, the sound f is also represented by gh, as in laugh.”8

  But buried in Beniowski’s tirade is something strangely hopeful. He was “convinced that the freedom of the human race may be achieved by the powers at the disposal of the present English generation.” This is a remarkable statement in a book that devotes so much ink to celebrating the languages of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Russian, and Polish, while slamming English and its users. But Beniowski also revered the English way of life and government, which made it that much more frustrating to him that the nation’s power to spread freedom remained paralyzed, “reduced to nothing, by the ignorance of the masses” that had been ensured by the pitiful spelling code. “Britons,” he screamed, “alter your alphabet—alter your orthography—make your language easy—speak to the world—be intelligible—and you shall conquer and liberate nations…” Somehow, Beniowski failed to see any connection between the individual freedoms that were cornerstones of the system of government he so respected, and the unpoliced use of language.

  The reforms required to rescue English, writes Beniowski, should be well known by now to anyone who has ever thought for a minute about language. “Return to the Hebrew alphabet,” “reject the double final consonants,” and decide on one letter to represent one sound only, even if that means instituting new letters, and stick to that agreement “without any exceptions, restrictions, or provisos.” Scholars adhering to the prescription of “Anti-absurdities” will, after a mere six months, look back on spellings of old and have “an unavoidable, insuperable, supernatural difficulty” abstaining from “laughing at the shocking orthography of the present writers.”9

  On the other side of the ocean, at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains and facing a vast salt lake, a religious leader was trying not only to clean up the confounding spelling system, but also to reinvent the alphabet. Brigham Young, president of the Latter Day Saints Church, was pulled into the world of spelling reform by a thirty-nine-year-old Englishman named George D. Watt.10 In the 1830s, Watt learned a shorthand s
ystem developed by a teacher back in England, which sparked in him a wider interest in alternative writing schemes. When he migrated to America five years later, Mormonism’s first British convert brought with him some unconventional ideas about spelling.

  In the 1850s, Watt and other Church higher-ups were developing a school system and, with Young’s endorsement, devised a thirty-eight-character alphabet. The best part: Not one of the letters from the standard English system was used. It was called the Deseret Alphabet, and over the next decade classes were taught to promote the new code, type was made for printing, ten thousand dollars was allocated for new textbooks, and the groovy new characters even adorned Mormon coins.11 And just so there’s no confusion on this point: The Deseret Alphabet is not the mysterious code written by God on the gold plates that Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, unearthed on a hill in Manchester, New York in 1827. Watt’s alphabet, in contrast, was merely a new way to write words to God.

  Like Beniowski and other reformers, the Mormons justified the scheme by pointing to the difficulties of the English spelling system and how, in Young’s words, “the years that are now required to learn to read and spell can be devoted to other studies.”12 Yet unlike language mavericks past, the Mormons saw the new system as a way to both include and exclude. Newcomers to the land (and faith) would more quickly assimilate into the culture if they had a more efficient alphabet and spelling system by which to learn the language. At the same time, an orthography of their own would give the Mormons a linguistic bunker, protecting them from outside forces that looked unfavorably on the newcomer religion.13

  The Deseret alphabet didn’t take and, tirades like Beniowski’s notwithstanding, the mid-nineteenth century saw a lull in efforts to remake the alphabet or reform English spelling. In contrast, this same period marks a burst of creativity in the area of constructed languages: languages made from scratch for the idealistic purpose of universal comprehension. Chief among these were the languages of Volapük, Esperanto (with its later spinoff, Ido), and then, in 1903, one called Latino Sine Flexione.

  Volapük came first, designed between 1879 and 1880 by a Roman Catholic priest in Germany named Johann Martin Schleyer. Like many before him, Schleyer’s religious convictions motivated him to dive into linguistic innovation. Appearing to the priest in a dream, God told him to develop an international language. “Go forth and fix the words so as to better spread My word,” or something along those lines. But Volapük was soon eclipsed by a simpler tongue endowed with a more enchanting name.

  Esperanto is “The International Language That Works!” according to its Web site, where banners also declare that it’s “A Second-Language for Everyone” and “A Gateway to the World.” Esperanto is alive and well today, or at least alive. Designed in 1887 by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, the son of Lithuanian Jews living in the Polish town of Bialystok, Esperanto was developed for that same simple magnificent goal: Reverse the curse of Babel. In the Book of Genesis, God is none too pleased with the residents of the peaceful and cosmopolitan city of Babylon. They had set their sights on building a tower that would reach the heavens, and were getting along so well that they almost pulled it off. To cut their effort short, end the harmonious coexistence of diverse peoples, or both, God confused their tongues, thereby introducing humanity to the concept, “lost in translation.”

  Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist (no wonder he didn’t like English spellings) and philologist, called himself “Dr. Esperanto”—one who hopes. Esperanto is essentially a goulash tongue consisting of romance language vocabulary and Slavic sound units. Some two million people worldwide allegedly speak Esperanto, although I’m skeptical as to how many are fluent speakers versus those who dabble for the sake of an oddball party trick, like chiming in with a little Klingon (from Star Trek) or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Elvish. Creators of Esperanto and other constructed languages aimed to have easy-to-learn grammars and avoid spelling irregularities by using more phonetic orthographies. But they have always had a host of marketing and sticking-power problems. Ili neniam sumiis pli ol kurioza5oj, which is Esperanto for: They never really amounted to much more than curiosities.14

  But what did get off the ground in the mid-nineteenth century was the most ambitious and authoritative English-language undertaking in history: compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Launched in 1857, the project would take twenty-seven years before the first portion was published, as James Murray and his team meticulously hunted etymologies and gathered together words and definitions mailed in by volunteers from across Britain, including the “madman,” W. C. Minor, a patient in residence at the Broad-moor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

  Somehow, spelling got hot again. What triggered the resurgence is difficult to say. The steady march of science and reason, sparked in part by Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), may have been a factor, insofar as people were thinking about the processes of gradual change over time. Reading was a mighty engine, as Dewey once put it, but to science-and engineering-inclined people of the late nineteenth century, English was beginning to look more and more like a machine in need of repair.

  By 1877, orthography enthusiasts in London were circulating a petition for a Spelling Reform Conference, led by the eminent Oxford professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology, Max Müller. The flyer called for action on a matter of “growing national misfortune.” “Language is not made for scholars and etymologists,” railed Müller, “and if the whole race of English etymologists were really swept away by the introduction of Spelling Reform, I hope they would be the first to rejoice in so good a cause.” Uniting with their American brothers, the British reformers pointed to legislative action in Connecticut and Massachusetts as evidence (albeit somewhat inflated evidence—these were only “committees to consider the feasibility…”) that the Americans were moving ahead with reforms to help address the problem of 5.5 million “illiterate persons” in the US.

  Equally alarming to the new reformers was the fact that promotion of English “in Japan, China, and the Islands of the Pacific was greatly hindered by the same cause.” For traders and evangelicals alike, the spelling code hurt business. A simplified orthography was the key to turning the world into what Dewey called the “English speaking race.” It was Webster’s nation binding on a global scale with a Christian spin, brought to you by Babel v2.0.

  DEWEY’S GIVEN NAME was Melville, but as a teenager he started writing it Melvil. On his twenty-eighth birthday, he changed his last name to “Dui.”15 The name stuck, for a while, until he applied for a job at Columbia University. He was hired as “Librarian-in-Chief,” on condition that he jettison, or at least be subtler about, his unorthodox views regarding orthography and use the original spelling of his family name.16 Although a future Columbia president would become a knight of Dewey’s round table of spelling reformers, at the time Dewey was applying for the job, University officials wanted nothing to do with the renegade spelling movement. (Soon after he was hired, the librarian formerly known as Dui received a letter from a friend: “I am very glad to see that you write your name Dewey. Now pray lay aside some, at least, of your orthographical peculiarities, and spell like common folk.”)

  Dewey was a frighteningly organized human being. His journals, usually written in shorthand, reveal an obsession with streamlining and efficiency. For a period of years, he and his wife Annie would start off every month by composing a to-do list. Her categories included: “Exercise 1 hr; Self-Culture, 1 hr; Sing 15 Min; Don’t waste a minute.” His to-dos were things like, “Horse-back 3 a week; Dress well; Short, organized letters; Rise early; eat slowly; Make no promises; Breathe deeply, sing, and settle cash daily.”17 Such was the temperament of the man who chose as his three primary pursuits in life, library organization, simplification of English spelling, and promotion of the metric system.

  When the American Philological Society launched in 1876, its members determined to use and promote a dozen new spellings. They were: tho, altho, thru, thruout, thoro, thoroly, thorofare, program, pro
log, catalog, pedagog, and decalog. That same year, Dewey, then only twenty-five, attended the International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography in Philadelphia, where he hobnobbed with a community of learned men committed to “the good cause.” Out of that convention sprang the Spelling Reform Association, with Dewey as its secretary on paper, and pied piper in practice. By the end of the decade, his optimism was iridescent. “A few years ago,” he wrote, “it required some hardihood for an educated man to declare himself in favor of simplified spelling, but since the founding of the Spelling Reform Association in 1876 every prominent student of English living, both American and foreign, has conceded that scholarship, as well as common sense, requires the change which is quietly but steadily going forward.”

  Spelling reform was gaining traction. In 1894, Senator W. E. Chandler of New Hampshire introduced to Congress a resolution: “To encourage better spelling of the English language, to make easier, more logical, and more rapid the world of pupils in learning to read, and to reduce the cost of printing and writing.” The bill called upon the country’s Public Printer to begin printing all government materials with words spelled according to rules developed by the Philological Society of England and the American Philologic Society, to wit: rough becomes ruf; written becomes writin; cider becomes sider; and parliament becomes parlament.18 The resolution failed but similar government action was on the horizon, this time from the White House.