twenty-three letters wherewith to write at least thirty-two sounds. In the process of phonetic change, whose tendency is always toward the increase of the spoken alphabet, the filling up of the system of articulated sounds by the distinction of slighter and more nicely differentiated shades of articulation, our spoken alphabet has very notably outgrown the limits of our written alphabet.
To this cause are to be attributed, in part, the anomalies of our orthography. But only in the lesser part. If an alphabet is hardly able to enlarge itself to the dimensions of a growing body of sounds, it is because men do not easily learn to write their words otherwise than as they have been accustomed to do, even when they have learned to pronounce them otherwise—and the same cause operates in other ways yet more effectually to bring about a discordance between the spoken and the written language. It has been the misfortune of the English to pass, during its written period, through the most important crisis in its history, its mixture with the Norman French, also a written tongue: not only were the discordant orthographic usages of the two thus forced together within the limits of the same language, but a period of both orthoëpic and orthographic confusion was introduced—and the orthographic confusion has been, in great measure, only stereotyped, not remedied, by the usage of later times.
We of the present age have thus been in a measure deprived, not by our own fault, of the advantages belonging to a phonetic mode of writing—advantages which seemed to have been secured to us by the joint labours of so many races and so many generations. And yet, we are not altogether without fault in the matter, for we are consenting unto the deeds of our fathers and predecessors. As a community, we are not content with accepting as inevitable our orthographical inheritance, and resolving to make the best of it, despite its defects; we even defend it as being better than any other; we strive to persuade ourselves that an etymological or a historical mode of spelling, as we phrase it, is inherently preferable to a phonetic. Now it is altogether natural and praiseworthy that we should be strongly attached to a time-honoured institution, in the possession of which we have grown up,
