PHONETIC WRITING is the representation of speech by means of symbols for the elementary sounds of language. All alphabetic writing is essentially phonetic. The invention of letters was the invention of phonetic writing, as distinguished from the older pictorial, or ideographic, writing. Front a variety of causes, however, no language has ever been perfectly represented by its spelling, and with the lapse of time the 'diver gence has gone on increasing, since the spoken words are constantly undergoing change, while the spelling tends to remain fixed. In English, more especially, this divergence lens been allowed to proceed to such an extreme that it is admitted on all hands to be a serious evil, and in recent times various schemes have been projected to remedy it. It is to these schemes of radically reformed spelling that the name of phonetic writing is now more especially applied; and what follows, represents the views and arguments of the promoters of the movement, and sketches its history.
The earliest attempts at alphabetic writing were as strictly phonetic as the limited scheme of symbols allowed, or as the limited aim of writers required. The alphabets were confined almost exclusively to consonants; and the analysis of speech on which they were based was of course confined to the languages for which the alphabets were designed. When any old alphabet,. therefore, came to be adopted for is new language or dialect., it would be found deficient in the means of writing any sounds which were not used in the language for which the alphabet was originally intended. Unless, then, new symbols were added for the new sounds, these latter must have been represented by conventional combinations of letters; and at this point the wilting would cease to be perfectly phonetic.
The Sanskrit language furnishes the most convincing proof of the original phonetic character of alphabetic writing; for not only were words written exactly as they were sounded, but every change which a word underwent in utterance was consistently imIi cated by a change in the writing. Notwithstanding this fact, there is no language in which the etymological and grammatical relations of words are more clearly exhibited or easily traced than in Sanskrit. Our own language illustrates the same principle. No
difficulty is experienced iu discovering the relation between loaf and loaves, wife and wires, notwithstanding the change off into z in the plural; nor would any difficulty Ire created though the s also were changed, as it is in sound, and the words written as they arc pronounced—lovz The English language embraces in its dialects almost all the.elementnry sounds of all languages; and the Latin alphabet, which was adopted for its writing, was so insuffi cient in the number of its characters, that many new letters would have been required to adopt it for the representation of Anglo-Saxon and other words. But, in place of being extended, the alphabet was reverentially accepted with all its imperfections; its deficiencies were supplemented by the use of servile or silent letters, and by N'arious expedients; and thus our writing came to be irregular, difficult, and fluctuating. The great inconvenience, however, of representing by the same character the sounds of U and V led to the introduction of the former as a new letter for the vowel sound, and to the limitation of the latter character to the consonant sound; and the further ambiguity arising from the want of an appropriate sign for the sound of W led to the invention of that symbol, which, being formed by joining together two of the old V characters, was thence called "double V "—pronounced, according to the old sound of V, " double U." The phonetic principle was fully recognized in these changes, and they furnish precedent for further changes, when a necessity-for them shall be suffi ciently felt and acknowledged.
There can be no douV.; that phonetic writing would greatly facilitate the acquisition of the power of reading, and consequently of the education of children and illiterate adults, as web as tend to the reduction of dialects to one common standard, and further the diffusion of our language in foreign countries. To learn to read from perfectly phonetic characters would be merely to learn the alphabet, and to spell would be merely to analyze pronunciation. A child at school might be made a fluent reader in a few weeks. All uncertainty of pronunciation•would vanish at the sight of a word, and dictionaries of pronunciation would be superfluous.