Spelling is originally phonetic, its aim to convey to the eye the sound heard by the ear; but in modern English the usage of pronunciation has drifted far from the conventional forms established by a traditional orthography, with the result that the present spelling of our written speech is to a large extent a mere exercise of memory, full of confusing anomalies and imperfections, and involving an enormous and unnecessary strain on the faculties of learners. The modern English alphabet consists of twenty-six letters, of which five are vowels, and of these not even the consonants are consistent in sound, as may be readily seen in the current pronunciation of such words as give, gin; cent, cant; thin, this; cough, dough; sough, hiccough, hough; loch, arch, patriarch. Some again are superfluous, as hard c, q, x, their sounds being capable of being represented by other letters; while others remain silent in pronunciation, as seen in through, plough, debt, knell, write, lamb, malign, demesne, trait. Further anomalies appear in walk, folk as opposed to malt, fault; while a stranger series still appear in such words as colonel, lieutenant, foreign, scent, island, scythe, scissors, rhyme, ache, sceptic. Again, the same vowel or diphthong meets us in such varying forms as the following (from Mr Lounsbury's lists): the short e variously in met, sweat, any, said, says, jeopardy; the long e in meet, mete, meat, machine, grief, receive, key, quay, people, ægis. Again, take the varying forms of the same vowel-sound in rude, rucd, rood, routine, rheum, drew, shoe, move, bruise; while on the other hand six different sounds have the same form in sour, pour, would, tour, sought, couple; and five in heat, sweat, great, heart, heard. Groups of words like man, lane, ask, salt on the one side, and why, wine, eye, lie, or air, heir, eyre, ere, e'er on the other, show equally a violation of the fundamental principle of all rational spelling—viz. that of representing every sound by an invariable symbol.
Examples enough have been given to demonstrate the utterly unscientific character of English spelling; it now remains to ask how this has originated, and whether any measure of relief from such a burden is practicable. It was only slowly that this modern uniformity became rigid, and we may dismiss as completely without foundation the defence put forward by pre-scientific philologists like Trench that the modern spelling is valuable as preserving an index to the derivation. Even if this were true, are we justified in paying so great a price for an end so little? But when we look at the facts we find that if the conventional spelling in some few cases preserves a hint as to the ultimate origin, as in annit, newt, knave, debt, it is far more often the case that it obscures the order of descent, or merely preserves the memory of some error through false analogy or sheer ignorance, as in words like shame-faced, rhyme, comptroller, isinglass, whole, bridegroom, stark-naked, battledoor, belfry, taffrail, spruce-beer. Again, the infallible writers for the press talk with indignation of being divorced from the tongue of Shakespeare and the Bible; but, as Dr Murray says, the slightest glance at 17th-century orthography will show what an immense amount of spelling reform has been done since then. Thus Psalm cvi., as printed in 1611, differs in 116 spellings from that printed in 1892; the first chapter of Genesis, in 135 spellings. One of the most important spelling reforms in English was that made about 1630 when u was made a vowel and v a consonant, for up to that time these were only forms of the same letter having a position-rank like long f and short s. From the 14th century onwards a fashion grew of adapting the spelling of words to their supposed Latin originals, with what confusion to the real history of the words may be imagined from the accidental or capricious errors of sciolists innocent of scientific method. But generally speaking up to the 16th century English spelling was mainly phonetic like the present German. The old scribes allowed themselves large liberty in the forms they adopted, to which Chaucer refers in the well-known lines, 'and for there is so great diverse in English, and in writing of our tong.' The Ormulum is an interesting example of a consistent attempt at a phonetic spelling. But as literature developed and the printing-press began to assert its authority the spelling became more and more fixed, till at last it became quite stationary, while the pronunciation continued to go on changing without intermission until, as Mr Sweet says, our present spelling does not represent the English we actually speak, but rather the language of the 16th century. This progress towards uniformity went on actively during the 17th century, but it was Johnson's Dictionary (1755) that gave universality to the currency. Meantime spoken language grew, and natural divergencies arose, resulting in the modern pronouncing dictionary, which Trench called with justice 'the absurdest of all books.'
Halliwell tells us Shakespeare spelt his name in some thirty different forms; the young Pretender writes of his father indifferently as Jeins or Gems; Claverhouse, says Macaulay, spelt like a washerwoman; and the great Marlborough used the same freedoms as Thackeray's Jeames or the ordinary Englishman whose education stopped short for ever at the Fourth Standard. But we may remember that Will Honeycomb never liked pedantry in spelling, and spelt like a gentleman, not like a scholar. And we must not suppose that great as was Johnson's influence all his spellings have been accepted. His music, ambassador, horrow, cimeter, waterfal, parsnep, skeptick, sackcloth, have disappeared; but some of his strange pairs of inconsistencies survive: movable and immovable, chilifactory and chyle, bias and unbiased. Similar are recognize and surprise, confer and conferred, worship and worshipper. Webster in his 1828 edition gives us many original spellings, as melasses, pretense, bridegoom, all of which were swept away in the revision of 1864. Julius Hare and Thirlwall adopted such forms as forein, sorcrein, cherisht, preacht, from one-sided considerations of philology; Ritson's habit of adding -ed to the preterite of all verbs was but one among many of the whimsical notions of a half-crazy antiquary; Pinkerton's vagaries are beneath notice; the usages familiar to readers of Mr Furnivall's 'fore-words' belong to quite another category, and might be commended altogether, but for the saving caution of Mr Sweet that 'nothing can be done without unanimity, and until the majority of the community are convinced of the superiority of some one system unanimity is impossible.' For spelling reform must proceed by a wise moderation, and Englishmen as yet are far from being ready for such elaborate systems as the Glossic of Mr Ellis, the Romic of Mr Sweet, or even the Phonetik type which Mr Pitman has been bravely printing for fifty years. But to these scholars the cause owes all the progress it has made, and their names will live in honoured memory when rational principles at last prevail over the tremendous forces of inertia and prejudice. It is hard to reason men out of beliefs they have never been reasoned into, and it may yet be long before our children are relieved of an unnecessary burden too heavy to be borne. That we can still read Chaucer and Piers Plowman despite Johnson's Dictionary should dispose of the one specious difficulty objected to reform; another—viz. that uniformity would confound such homonyms as write, rite, right, and wright—is answered by the fact that the identity of sound troubles us little in speaking, and would trouble us still less in reading, with the help of the context before us. Meantime the true path of progress should follow such wisely moderate counsels as those of Dr Murray: the dropping of the final or inflexional silent c; the restoration of the historical -t after breath-consonants; uniformity in the employment of double consonants, as in the American traveler, &c.; the discarding of ue in words like demagogue and cataloque; the uniform leveling of the agent -our into -or, already so common in America; the making of ea = ē short into e and the long ie into ee; the restoration of some, come, tongue, to their old English forms, sum, cum, tung; a more extended use of z in the body of words, as chozen, praize, raize; and the correction of the worst individual monstrosities, as foreign, scent, scythc, ache, debt, people, parliament, court, would, sceptic, phthisis, queuc, schedule, twopence-halfpenny, yeoman, sieve, gauge, barque, buoy, yacht, &c.
An encouraging success is the improvement of German spelling, introduced in 1880, the chief features of which are the omission of all superfluous signs indicating the lengthening of a syllable, the substitution of f for ph, the determination of the sound of s hard and soft, the use of sz, the doubling of consonants, the retention of h as indicating vowel-lengthening only in root-syllables: Akt, Armut, Elefant, tot, Irrtum, Wert.
See PHONETICS, PHILOLOGY, ALPHABET; also the Philological Society's Transactions for 1880–81 (including the Presidential addresses of Murray and Ellis); Sweet's Handbook of Phonetics (1877) and History of English Sounds (1888); Max-Müller in Fort. Rev., April 1876.