A PLEA,
&c.
WHILE we are still children, and have to thumb the spelling book, and perhaps, with many tears, to learn the orthography of every word in the language out of Entick's Dictionary, or some such well-known school manual, we feel all the horrors of our present heterotypy; but when we have mastered the art of spelling so far as to be able to read fluently at sight, and to write without making any very great mistakes of orthography, we forget the intense labour with which we acquired two arts, which are nearly as necessary to us as speaking and hearing. And because we feel no trouble in reading words, with which we are familiar by having seen them thousands of times in our lives, we overlook the fact that every one who sees them for the first time will have the greatest difficulty in discovering what sounds they represent. But, take the foreigner—we shall learn more from him than from a boy, because when we see a man in full power of intellect, desirous of learning, and unsparing in his efforts to gain knowledge, yet fail to acquire a facility in reading our language, even when the mere pronunciation of any word offers no difficulties to him, we can no longer put ourselves off with paltry excuses; we must own that there is a why, and a very serious one, although we do not now feel it ourselves. We don't feel it? Nay, let us be sincere; let us take up a scientific work containing many new words, technical words, derived from languages with which we are unacquainted, and Englished after the usual disguising fashion, ⸮do we never stumble—never falsely accentuate—never blunder in the sounds given to the vowels? Nay, take the very name of the art we are now treating of, PHONOTYPY; present it thus written, and see whether every one pronounces it nearly in the same way; ⸮will you not hear "fɷnot'ɩpɩ, fɷnɷtip'ɩ, fonɷtip'ɩ,"[1] and such like? We have heard these pronunciations given. But without travelling to unknown languages, let us take technical words of common life; the printers have types called primer, pica, bourgeois, and paper called demy. ⸮Well, my friend, how do you pronounce these words? If you have spent your time at a public school and at a university, if you have learned French and Italian, we imagine that you will stumble upon very many pronunciations before you arrive at the true, "primur, pɩcu, burjỏs', dimɩ'." The first, perhaps, you may utter, though it will be only a guess, but, if you are like ourselves, your first ideas of the three last will be "pɩca," "bɯrjwa," and " demɩ;" sounds very remote indeed from the usual ones. Thus it is with all words in common life.
- ↑ The meaning of these symbols, called "phonotypes," will be sufficiently explained in the first of the following tables, pp. 5—8.
