Sound/Symbol Representations: The Case For and Against Manipulation of the Orthography

Abstract

It has been noted on several occasions (Scragg 1974; Jones 1995: chapter 3; Beal 1999: 80ff) that, while large-scale and wholesale attempts at reformation of the standard orthography are a characteristic of the latter part of the eighteenth-century orthoepistic tradition (Matthews 1936a) (and one which continued, as we shall see in Part III, into the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century), early eighteenth-century writers on grammar and spelling take little or no interest in the subject. With two or three possible major exceptions, this observation is probably well justified, although it would need to be refined quite carefully in the light of how one might define ‘spelling reform’. Writers in the first half of the eighteenth century repeatedly claim that the source of nearly all ‘wrong’ pronunciation lies with poor spelling or, probably most frequently, with an inability to follow explicitly the dictates of the standard spelling system itself. They suggest that the main solution to the problem of the low standards of pronunciation which result from this, lies in the promotion and teaching of the standard orthography through some of the means we have discussed in the previous chapter. As Watts (1721: xvii) observes: ‘when [people] have learn’d the Use of a Pen, they make such a hideous Jumble of Letters to stand for Words, that neither the Vulgar nor the Learned can guess what they mean’. The type of solution he proposes to correct this state of affairs is at once conditioned by his insistence upon the primacy of the vernacular and spoken form of the language in educational matters, and by the reservations he shows — as we have already noted, and will return to below — on any total reliance on a rule-governed method of acquiring a competence in the standard orthography: ‘the Art of Reading is best begun like the Art of Speaking, and that is, by Rote; tho’ ‘tis best improv’d and perfected by Rules’ (1721: xv).