River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1903-11-19
LANGUAGE TINKERING.
Efforts to Make the Alphabet More
Enthusiastically Not
Everything.

Another language 1Inkering project is
afoot. Labor saving and condensation
are its object. 1t will not do to incur
the labor of writing two letters when
one will suffice, and space must not be
wasted by printing two, when one will
posed to introduce into the alphabet
two new characters. One is to repre-
sent the sound of 9Th" and the other that
of ''sh"-the latter being now repre-
seuted in some words by various other
combinations of two or three letters.
Then, to avoid increasing the alphabet
to % letters, the single letters q and K
are to be dropped, and their work is to
be done by the combinations "cw" and
"cs," respectively. The introduction
of the very same evil that in the former
case is to be eliminated from it seems
inconsistent; but it is argued that 9Th"
and Ssh" and it's kindred combinations
occur much more frequently than q and
X, SO that there will be a net gain in
substituting the lesser evil for the
greater.
This proposal, says the New York
Tribune, aims, of course, at making the
alphabet more purely phonetic than it
now is. theoretically, that aim may be
a good one. Practically, it is unattain-
able, and is of doubtful value If our
alphabet were made phonetic, there
would be no combining it to 26 letters.
1t would have to be expanded to several
TYpan I.n& L IL
cumbersome. The alternative would be
to abolish the majority of our vowel
and consonant sounds and go back to a
more primitive form of speech which
also would be intolerable The fact is,
highly developed and cultivated Ian
guage cannot have purely phonetic al
phabet. 1t must represent several
sounds by the same letter or combina-
ton Of letters, just as it must use the
same word to express different ideas.
Those conditions are made necessary
by the multiplicity of sounds and ideas
among highly civilized people. Some
comparatively primitive alphabets have
been more nearly phonetic than ours.
But no civilized language to-day has,
in the strict sense, a phonetic alphabet
Or anything like it,
AS for these two proposed phonetic
characters, it is to be observed that one
of them is merely revival of an old
one, which long ago was pretty gen.
orally abandoned The Phoenicians,
the Greeks and the Hebrews had each
letter corresponding to our eth But
hn T of MI
ons had such letter, the memory of
which survived until comparatively re-
cent times in the affected and ignorant
'ye" for the" But it was dropped
when Anglo-Saxon was developed into
English. 1t does not seem unreasonable
to suppose that it was thus dropped be-
cause it was found to be, on the whole,
improbable and undesirable. If it had
been really good thing, it would have
been retained The law of the survival
of the fittest prevails in philology as
well as in biology.
Despite the proverbial inclination of
newspapers toward brevity and con-
densation, we cannot approve such
changes in the language as these which
are proposed. The saving of space is
good thing, no doubt, but it is not the
best thing. Accuracy is better. We
should not be gamers, but great losers,
if, in remodeling words for the sake of
brevity, we disguised their derivation
and etymology and destroyed their in
dividual characteristics, and so made
the correct use of them less easy and
less certain. There is a fable of Lon
don firm which saved some thousands
Of pounds sterling year in ink just by
emitting to dot the is and cross the t's
in correspondence. We have not heard
of that alleged example being widely
copied Neither do we believe there
will be any general approval of scheme
for turning the English language topsy-
turvy for the sake of getting a few more
words into newspaper column or upon
the page of book