Page:Handbook of simplified spelling.djvu/18

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10
ENGLISH SPELLING, AND THE

Hare, Walter Savage Landor, Isaac Pitman, Bulwer Lytton, Alexander J. Ellis, Horace Mann, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Max Miiller, and Jacob Grimm.

Filologists Favor Spelling Reform
Important advances in the study of the history of English hav been made in the last three-quarters of a century. More and more scolars, educators, and men of letters hav become aware that its spelling has faild to keep pace with its growth or to record its changes, hav been able to perciev the causes of its backwardness and to understand the needless burdens that English spelling imposes on all who hav to learn it, to teach it, and to use it, and the obstacle it presents to the use of English as an international language—a use for which, as Grimm pointed out, it is in all other respects peculiarly adapted. And these scolars and writers, including men recognized as the highest authorities in their respectiv fields both in Great Britain and in America, many of them members of the Philological Society (London) and of the American Philological Association, began in the last quarter of the 19th Century a serious and concerted agitation for the improvement of English spelling.

Fonetic Spelling Reformers
A contributing factor was the movement for fonetic reform that followd Isaac Pitman's invention of fonografic shorthand, at first (1837) cald "stenographic sound-hand." Seeking to extend the principle of his sistem to longhand and printing. Pitman, in association with Alexander J. Ellis, a scolarly filologist and fonetician, devized a fonetic English alfabet, promoted it in his Phonographic Journal (founded 1842), and organ-