LETTERS, AND ARTICULATE SOUNDS). The first attempts, then, at writing any lan guage must have exhibited great diversity of spelling. Wherever an extensive literature has sprung up among a people, and language been made a study of itself, there a greater or less uniformity of spelling has, by tacit convention or otherwise, become established for a time. Such was the case with Latin in the time of the Cresars, with high German about the 12th and 13th centuries, and with English (Anglo-Saxon) in and for some time after the days of Alfred. But although language, as depicted to the eye, may be fixed for a time, the spoken tongue, being a living organism, cannot be thus petrified. A written literature may modify, and in some degree retard, but cannot altogether arrest that incessant change and evolution to which all spoken tongues are subject. The breaking up of the Anglo-Saxon in its transition into modern English brought necessa rily a period of orthographic chaos. Never was the lawlessness greater than during one of the brightest periods of the literature, namely, the Elizabethan period. Then, and for a long time after, all perception of the real powers of the letters seems to have been lost, and nothing but caprice ruled. Not only were words spelled differently by different persons, but even among the best-educated classes the same person would spell the same word (even his or her own name) half-a-dozen ways in the same page. Among the writers of the Queen Anne period, some degree of uniformity began to establish itself, and this was afterwards further confirmed and fixed by the publication of John son's Dictionary, since which time the alterations have been comparatively trifling.
The modern spelling thus established conformed itself only partially to the changes the spoken language had undergone. Of the letters that had become silent through the wearing away and collapse of the spoken words, some were omitted and others retained, with little attention to consistency, or to any principle now discernible. Hence, in the English now written and spoken, there is in general so imperfect a corre spondence between the sound of a word and the sounds of the several letters that are written to represent it, that the spelling of each individual word has, in a manner, to be learned by itself. By no possible rules can a learner be taught when he sees the groups of letters n-o-w, p-l-o-u-g-h, e-n-o-u-g-h, to make out the sounds or spoken words that these groups actually represent; or, conversely, when he hears the words spoken, to find out what letters they are to be represented by.. This circumstance presents great difficulty to foreigners iu the acquisition of English; which, in other respects, is one of the sim plest and most easily learned languages in the world. The orthography of English is only to be acquired by observation and practice. There are no rules in the proper sense of the word; the only effective assistance that can be given in this matter is to bring together, under some kind of classification, the words that are most frequently mis spelled. See PHONETIC 'WRITING.