[lg policy] George Curme: Orthographic Radical

[Harold Schiffman]

 George Curme: Orthographic Radical

As I promised last week
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/12/11/george-curme-21st-century-grammarian/>,
let me briefly discuss a further noteworthy fact about an interesting 1914
paper by George O. Curme <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2917013>.
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.)

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 Simplified Spelling Board
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board> 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 *Chicago
Tribune*) experimented with simplified spellings, and by 1914 *Modern
Language Notes* clearly permitted authors to experiment thus but did not
require it (the papers before and after Curme’s use standard spelling).

Inducing Curme’s rules from his practice, like most reverse engineering, is
not straightforward; but the relevant principles seem to include these:

   1. Silent *e* is dropped from the ends of short-vowel syllables, so we
   find *accurate* → *accurat*, *definite* → *definit*, *give* → *giv*,
   *have* → *hav*, *imagine* → *imagin*, *immediately* → *immediatly*,
   *infinitive* → *infinitiv* (as in Curme’s title), *moderately* →
   *moderatly*, *negative* → *negativ*, *practise* → *practis*, *treatise*
   → *treatis*, and (treating the syllabic laterals on the ends of words
   like *bottle* as short-vowel syllables) also *example* → *exampl*,
   *inseparable* → *inseparabl*, *little* → *littl*, *possible* → *possibl*,
   *resemble* → *resembl*, *simple* → *simpl*, etc.
   2. Silent *e* is also dropped from certain commonly unstressed function
   words ending in *-re*: *are* → *ar*, *there* → *ther*, *were* → *wer*,
   *where* → *wher*, etc. (though the adjective *mere* retains its final
   letter).
   3. Doubled *s* or *l* at the ends of at least some syllables is reduced
   to single *s* or *l*, so we find *shall* → *shal*, *still* → *stil*,
   *stress* → *stres*, etc.
   4. The endings of regular preterites and past participles are respelled
   in a way that corresponds to the pronunciation: *called* → *cald*,
   *employed* → *employd*, *endeavored* → *endeavord*, *prevailed* →
   *prevaild*, but *attached* → *attacht*, *developed* → *developt*,
   *established* → *establisht*, *fixed* → *fixt*, *marked* → *markt*,
   *promised* → *promist*, etc.
   5. Various other substitutions are made:
      - the vowel of *bet* is spelled *e* ;
      - the vowel of *but* is spelled *u* ;
      - the vowel of *boat* is spelled *o* (or *oe* before a consonant
      letter);
      - the vowel of *bought* is spelled *au* ;
      - *f* replaces *gh* and *ph* when they are pronounced *f* ;
      - *r*  replaces *wr* and *rh* when they are pronounced *r* ;

   hence *brought* → *braut*, *thought* → *thaut*, *emphasis* → *emfasis*,
   *enough* → *enuf*, *following* → *folloing*, *follows* → *folloes*,
   *head* → *hed*, *rhythm* → *rythm*, *spread* → *spred*, *writer* →
   *riter*, *written* → *ritten*, etc.

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.

British and American spelling conventions
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences>
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.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/12/15/george-curme-orthographic-radical/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en




-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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