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If phonotypy be generally used,
1. Children, of six or eight years old, will be able to learn to read in a week.
2. Those who can now read heterotypy will learn to read in ten minutes.
3. No difficulty will be experienced in spelling any word which can be pronounced with accuracy.
4. No doubt will be experienced as to the proper pronunciation of any word which meets the eye.
5. Every one will be able to spell as correctly as he pronounces.
6. Foreigners will never be led into any errors of pronunciation by the orthography of words.
7. Our language, which is about the simplest, in its grammatical construction, of any in the world, will be rendered accessible to the whole of mankind, and will be much more extensively read and spoken.
8. Missionaries will be able to reduce the languages of any tribes to an alphabetical form, and to print it off with ease; no language need be unwritten, no difficulty experienced in giving the names of places, &c. All the immense variety of existing alphabets may be merged into one, and thus one great stumblingblock to the student of languages (especially of Oriential languages) immediately removed.
9. Reading and writing will no longer be thought feats, their attainment being the end and aim which the parents of most poor children have in sending them to school; they will take their proper places as subsidiary arts, without which we can learn nothing, but which contain no learning in themselves;—they will be universally esteemed the beginnings, and not the ends, of education.[1]
To conclude. Suppose we had not this "monkish orthography," but a better system, and some one were to propose the former, and show its beauties by the tables just given, ⸮would he not be scouted at for daring to propose what is so self-evidently absurd? And, ⸮are generations yet unborn to undergo the labour of wading through this mass of blunders merely because we now have a bad system of spelling? ⸮Is this one argument, it is so, and must, therefore, remain so, to supersede all reason? Forbid it, common sense!
17 April, 1845.
- ↑ These are advantages and disadvantages entirely due to the method of spelling, the subject to which we have confined ourselves in this tract. But we cannot help drawing attention here to the great difference, in point of mere quill-driving, between the heterographic long hand, which is necessary for the perfect expression of the present heterography, and the beautiful system of phonographic short hand, which corresponds to Phonotypy letter by letter, so that, although a phonographic long hand is furnished, the short may, in almost every conceivable case, supply its place. When we recollect that, without hurrying, phonographic short hand enables us to write at least three times as many words in the same time as heterographic long hand, at much less than half the bodily fatigue, the saving of labour in mere writing may be thus, at a very moderate calculation, estimated at five-sixths. Those who know, from practical experience, the pains and labour of much writing under the present system, will properly appreciate this boon; but no one can avoid being struck with the immense economy of the plan here recommended in writing, as well as reading.
