you get rid of that m. But never mind about the connecting
strokes–let them go. Without counting them, the twenty-six
letters of our alphabet consumed about eighty pen-strokes for
their construction–about three pen-strokes per letter.
It is THREE TIMES THE NUMBER required by the phonographic
alphabet. It requires but ONE stroke for each letter.
My writing-gait is–well, I don’t know what it is, but I
will time myself and see. Result: it is twenty-four words per
minute. I don’t mean composing; I mean COPYING. There isn’t any
definite composing-gait.
Very well, my copying-gait is 1,440 words per hour–say
1,500. If I could use the phonographic character with facility I
could do the 1,500 in twenty minutes. I could do nine hours’
copying in three hours; I could do three years’ copying in one
year. Also, if I had a typewriting machine with the phonographic
alphabet on it–oh, the miracles I could do!
I am not pretending to write that character well. I have
never had a lesson, and I am copying the letters from the book.
But I can accomplish my desire, at any rate, which is, to make
the reader get a good and clear idea of the advantage it would be
to us if we could discard our present alphabet and put this
better one in its place–using it in books, newspapers, with the
typewriter, and with the pen.
[Figure 6] –MAN DOG HORSE. I think it is graceful and
would look comely in print. And consider–once more, I beg–what
a labor-saver it is! Ten pen-strokes with the one system to
convey those three words above, and thirty-three by the other!
[Figure 6] I mean, in SOME ways, not in all. I suppose I might
go so far as to say in most ways, and be within the facts, but
never mind; let it go at SOME. One of the ways in which it
exercises this birthright is–as I think–continuing to use our
laughable alphabet these seventy-three years while there was a
rational one at hand, to be had for the taking.
It has taken five hundred years to simplify some of
Chaucer’s rotten spelling–if I may be allowed to use to frank a
term as that–and it will take five hundred years more to get our
exasperating new Simplified Corruptions accepted and running
smoothly. And we sha’n’t be any better off then than we are now;
for in that day we shall still have the privilege the Simplifiers
are exercising now: ANYBODY can change the spelling that wants
to.
BUT YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE PHONOGRAPHIC SPELLING; THERE ISN’T
ANY WAY. It will always follow the SOUND. If you want to change
the spelling, you have to change the sound first.
Mind, I myself am a Simplified Speller; I belong to that
unhappy guild that is patiently and hopefully trying to reform
our drunken old alphabet by reducing his whiskey. Well, it will
improve him. When they get through and have reformed him all
they can by their system he will be only HALF drunk. Above that
condition their system can never lift him. There is no
competent, and lasting, and real reform for him but to take away
his whiskey entirely, and fill up his jug with Pitman’s wholesome
and undiseased alphabet.
One great drawback to Simplified Spelling is, that in print
a simplified word looks so like the very nation! and when you
bunch a whole squadron of the Simplified together the spectacle
is very nearly unendurable.
The da ma ov koars kum when the publik ma be expektd to get
rekonsyled to the bezair asspekt of the Simplified Kombynashuns,
but–if I may be allowed the expression–is it worth the wasted
time? [Figure 7]
To see our letters put together in ways to which we are not accustomed
offends the eye, and also takes the EXPRESSION out of the words.
La on, Makduf, and damd be he hoo furst krys hold, enuf!
It doesn’t thrill you as it used to do. The simplifications
have sucked the thrill all out of it.
But a written character with which we are NOT ACQUAINTED
does not offend us–Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, and the
others–they have an interesting look, and we see beauty in them,