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<h2 class="">George Curme: Orthographic Radical</h2>
<p>As I <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/12/11/george-curme-21st-century-grammarian/">promised last week</a>, let me briefly discuss a further noteworthy fact about an interesting <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2917013">1914 paper by George O. Curme</a>.
When I first saw the paper I thought there was a PDF encoding bug, or
my eyes were playing tricks, but not so. It turns out that Curme was a
radical reformer in one respect: He published his paper using an
extensively revised spelling system. (My quotations from him last week
regularized his spellings to current practice.)</p>
<p>Curme was apparently following proposals made over the previous 40
years, particularly at the International Convention for the Amendment of
English Orthography (Philadelphia, August 1876), which inspired
societies like the English Spelling Reform Association and American
Spelling Reform Association, and influenced the American Philological
Society and the American Philological Association (which teamed up to
issue a long list of proposed respellings) as well as the National
Education Association. A group called the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board">Simplified Spelling Board</a>
started getting significant donations (up to $25,000 per year, starting
in 1906) from Andrew Carnegie to work on the issue. A few newspapers
(e.g., the <em>Chicago Tribune</em>) experimented with simplified spellings, and by 1914 <em>Modern Language Notes</em>
clearly permitted authors to experiment thus but did not require it
(the papers before and after Curme’s use standard spelling).</p>
<p>Inducing Curme’s rules from his practice, like most reverse
engineering, is not straightforward; but the relevant principles seem to
include these:</p>
<ol type="i"><li>Silent <em>e</em> is dropped from the ends of short-vowel syllables, so we find <em>accurate</em> → <em>accurat</em>, <em>definite</em> → <em>definit</em>, <em>give</em> → <em>giv</em>, <em>have</em> → <em>hav</em>, <em>imagine</em> → <em>imagin</em>, <em>immediately</em> → <em>immediatly</em>, <em>infinitive</em> → <em>infinitiv</em> (as in Curme’s title), <em>moderately</em> → <em>moderatly</em>, <em>negative</em> → <em>negativ</em>, <em>practise</em> → <em>practis</em>, <em>treatise</em> → <em>treatis</em>, and (treating the syllabic laterals on the ends of words like <em>bottle</em> as short-vowel syllables) also <em>example</em> → <em>exampl</em>, <em>inseparable</em> → <em>inseparabl</em>, <em>little</em> → <em>littl</em>, <em>possible</em> → <em>possibl</em>, <em>resemble</em> → <em>resembl</em>, <em>simple</em> → <em>simpl</em>, etc.</li><li>Silent <em>e</em> is also dropped from certain commonly unstressed function words ending in <em>-re</em>: <em>are</em> → <em>ar</em>, <em>there</em> → <em>ther</em>, <em>were</em> → <em>wer</em>, <em>where</em> → <em>wher</em>, etc. (though the adjective <em>mere</em> retains its final letter).</li><li>Doubled <em>s</em> or <em>l</em> at the ends of at least some syllables is reduced to single <em>s</em> or <em>l</em>, so we find <em>shall</em> → <em>shal</em>, <em>still</em> → <em>stil</em>, <em>stress</em> → <em>stres</em>, etc.</li><li>The endings of regular preterites and past participles are respelled in a way that corresponds to the pronunciation: <em>called</em> → <em>cald</em>, <em>employed</em> → <em>employd</em>, <em>endeavored</em> → <em>endeavord</em>, <em>prevailed</em> → <em>prevaild</em>, but <em>attached</em> → <em>attacht</em>, <em>developed</em> → <em>developt</em>, <em>established</em> → <em>establisht</em>, <em>fixed</em> → <em>fixt</em>, <em>marked</em> → <em>markt</em>, <em>promised</em> → <em>promist</em>, etc.</li><li>Various other substitutions are made:
<ul><li>the vowel of <em>bet</em> is spelled <em>e</em> ;</li><li>the vowel of <em>but</em> is spelled <em>u</em> ;</li><li>the vowel of <em>boat</em> is spelled <em>o</em> (or <em>oe</em> before a consonant letter);</li><li>the vowel of <em>bought</em> is spelled <em>au</em> ;</li><li><em>f</em> replaces <em>gh</em> and <em>ph</em> when they are pronounced <em>f</em> ;</li><li><em>r</em> replaces <em>wr</em> and <em>rh</em> when they are pronounced <em>r</em> ;</li></ul>
<p>hence <em>brought</em> → <em>braut</em>, <em>thought</em> → <em>thaut</em>, <em>emphasis</em> → <em>emfasis</em>, <em>enough</em> → <em>enuf</em>, <em>following</em> → <em>folloing</em>, <em>follows</em> → <em>folloes</em>, <em>head</em> → <em>hed</em>, <em>rhythm</em> → <em>rythm</em>, <em>spread</em> → <em>spred</em>, <em>writer</em> → <em>riter</em>, <em>written</em> → <em>ritten</em>, etc.</p></li></ol>
<p>Such reforms are sensible enough. They might make learning to read
and spell easier (though of course learning the new system if you can
already read and spell would not be a trivial task). One can imagine a
world in which they were adopted by publishers as the standard way to
spell English in America, or worldwide. But it did not happen. By the
1920s, after Andrew Carnegie’s grants to the Simplified Spelling Board
had ended, the efforts of the reformers flagged. Publishers discontinued
experimentation and went back to the miserably irregular standard
spelling that English has now. Curme did likewise in his later
publications.</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences">British and American spelling conventions</a>
today (standardized mainly by the dictionary-makers Samuel Johnson in
Britain and Noah Webster in America) differ in only minor ways. It would
have been quite reasonable for American publishers when Webster was
alive to develop a new, simplified standard to replace the horrible
orthography that English has today. It might even have been
internationally acceptable. But while many educated people back then
were interested in that idea, very few are now, despite the fact that
English is now effectively (if somewhat undeservedly) the chief
international communication medium of planet Earth.</p><p><a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/12/15/george-curme-orthographic-radical/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en">http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/12/15/george-curme-orthographic-radical/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en</a><br></p><p><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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