Gold Hill daily news. [volume] (Gold Hill, N.T. [Nev.]) 1863-1882, 1867-04-11

digits, or if any one of them pos,
sessed an uncertain value. Any one
who will take the trouble to examine
this question will soon discover thai
each of the vowels represented by but
one character has many different sounds
Take a, for instance, in fate, fat, fair
and fall ; i in pipe has the full sound,
while i in pip is short and fsrky III
round and full in pope, but short and
crispy in pop. The ancient Greeks
had some idea of these vowel distinc'
lions. With them the long 9 was rep
resented by theta, and the short G by
epsilon. The letter omega symbolized
the long o, and omicron tho o short
The letter a has many scores OF repre-
sentatives, as a-e in hate and vale, eigh
in neigh and neighbor, ay in stay, al in
hail. This is the Ease with the other
vowels, and thousands upon thousands
Of illustrations might be presented to
show the labyrinth of difficulties in
which our system Of spelling is involved
Words may DO spelled without the em'
ployment of one letter commonly used,
as for instance, kawphy for coffee, which
could DO spelled kaughpheigh without
infracting any photographic rule. II
has been stated on good authority thai
the word scissors can be spelled many
thousand different ways.
Cm 6onoP responds the multitude,
Admit the correctness of your criticisms,
how is the difficulty to be remedied
We answer, distinctly, emphstically
boldly, by adopting the phonetic system,
Photography assigns to each elemen'
tary sound in tho language a separate
and distinct character. When the
phonetic value of these characters have
been learned, reading and spelling will be
attended with no serious difficulty. One
hundred individuals learned in the ele.
mentary sounds of our language and
the signs or letters that represent them,
would spell a given word with the same
characters, or a word composed of GER
tain phonetic signs or characters would
be pronounced the same by q hundred
individuals, Years of labor would be
saved if our schools should adopted the
phonetic system. Children would, in a
very short time, learn to read and spell,
not only correctly, but rapidly. The
mind of the pupil would not be burdened
by memorizing an indefinite number Of
rules, having. but a limited.value. An.
other advantage of this photographic
system is its labor-ssving tendency
more than half the writing labor would
be saved by adopting this system.
Though but few books have been
printed on the phonetic system, still
much has been already done to qualify
the public mind for its early adoption.
In nearly all the public, and well regu-
lated private schools in our country, the
phonetic system is taught to a greater
or lesser extent. Pupils are now taught
to analyse q word and to designate its
elementary sounds, to show whatletters
are silent or useless, and to spell the
word Theoretically. We are confident
in the hope, that at no very distant
period, the leading literary minds Of our
country will hold a national convention
with the view of adopting some means
to bring about a phonetic revolution.
When the work shall be commenced in
good earnest, the development will be
rapid. Once adopted among ourselves,
the principles will be accepted by other
nations, and ultimately all the languages
of our globe must be modified to har-
mouize with the lsvelling principles Of
this new science. The world does
novel