29
But there is another, and even a better, way of meeting this money argument. To the Englishman, time is money, and the balance should be made out thus: debtor, to the reprinting of all those copies of books which have been printed up to this time, and would have been consulted if the alphabet had not been changed (this by no means amounts even to 50 per cent, of those which now exist, and all fresh copies are, of course, excluded, as costing as much one way as another);[1] creditor, the whole of the time to each individual to be hereafter born, necessary for learning to read and spell, less one fortnight each (a mere nominal time). Say that, in thirty years, this would amount to saving only one year on an average in the life of five millions (assuming only 1-3rd of the population of England to learn to read), we should thus have the mental labour of five millions of years to apply elsewhere, and it needs no great political economist to prove that these five millions of years must be inconceivably more valuable than the cost of reprinting such of the books now existing as would ever be re-read.
Let us shortly sum up the consequences of heterotypy and phonotypy being general.
At present, heterotypy being in general use,
1. It takes years for a child to learn to read with tolerable accuracy.
2. It takes many more years before he is able to spell.
3. No one ever knows, with certainty, how to spell a word which he has only heard, and has not yet seen written.
4. No one ever knows, with certainty, how to pronounce a word which he has only seen, and never heard.
5. Very few can, or do, at all times, spell every word with which they are familiar, both in speaking and writing, correctly.
6. Foreigners are continually committing the most ludicrous mistakes of pronunciation, from being misled by the spelling.
7. The irregularities of spelling are the great cause of the difficulty experienced in learning our language.
8. Missionaries to foreign countries find the greatest difficulty in reducing to writing the dialects of the barbarous tribes which they are endeavouring to civilize; and travellers and geographers seem quite at a loss for a means of conveying the names of places which they have visited or described, the strange medleys of letters which they furnish being in general ludicrously unintelligible.
- ↑ This is not absolutely true, but the difference is entirely in favour of Phonotypy. If the reader will cast his eyes over the Tables so often referred to, he will find that, in almost every instance, the phonetic spelling of any given word occupies less space than the heterotypic. Some few words occupy the same space, and a very few, indeed (see under X, in the second table), more. This saving we may safely calculate at one-fifth; so that phonotypic works would necessarily cost 20 per cent. less than heterotypic for the same number of words. This is really an important discount. It would not be difficult to invent a "phonotypic short hand," similar to the "phonographic short hand," in which about 100 of the commonest words would be reduced to one or two letters at most, and about one-third of the number of letters would be saved in this manner. Such works would be very easily read by any one who had learned to read for a single year (or even less), and the saving in them over heterotypic works would be , or , being rather more than half. Attention will be hereafter paid to this important point of abbreviated printing.
