The Times, 15 April 1941

A KING’S SPELLING

LETTERS AND SOUNDS

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

Sir,—I am shocked by the levity and lèse-majesté of the leading article “A King’s Spelling” in your issue of March 28. You have failed to appreciate either the gravity of the subject or the laudable and sensible attempts of our Sovereign’s royal father to spell the English language as it ought to be spelt.

He was, however, attempting the impossible. The English language cannot be spelt, because there is no English alphabet. We make shift with a Latin alphabet which has only five vowels. The vowels we use, mostly diphthongs, are innumerable: no two inhabitants of these isles use the same set; but the sounds they utter are so far recognizably alike as to be intelligibly represented by 18 letters. The consonants, as to which there is much less difference of utterance, require 24 letters.

Our attempts to make a foreign alphabet of 26 letters do the work of 42 are pitiable. We write the same vowel twice to give it a different sound, and thus get five additional vowels. We couple two different vowels, or even triple them in various permutations, which give us much more than 18 vowel spellings. We also double the following consonant (compare “table” and “dabble,” for instance) or make two consonants represent simple sounds like the consonants in “thee” and “she,” for which the Latin alphabet does not provide.

These devices would make our alphabet phonetic enough for practical purposes if we used them consistently; but as our use of them is not consistent no one can pronounce a line of English from English writing or print. Still, it may be said that all we have to do is to make our usage consistent and the problem of spelling is solved. Those who think this a satisfactory solution overlook the stupendous fact that it takes twice as long to write two letters as to write one. When it is pointed out to them they protest that the fact is perfectly obvious to them. But stupendous! How? Why? Could any fact be more trivial?

Let us see. The issue of The Times in which the article headed “A King’s Spelling” appeared was reduced by the war rationing of paper to half the usual size. The leader page, including the article, contained 54,369 letters. Each of the pages in the smaller type used for advertisements contained 88,200 letters. As there were 10 pages we have to multiply these figures by 10. Averaging them we get 712,845 letters as the content of a typical war-rationed 10-page issue of The Times. For a normal peace issue of The Times we must more than double this figure, which means that every 24 hours in the office of The Times alone a million and a half letters must be separately and legibly written or typed on paper, that someone reading from the paper must monotype them on a machine which arranges and casts them in metal, to be finally printed on huge rolls of paper by another machine the wear and tear of which is in proportion to the area of paper covered by the letters. This colossal labour has to be repeated every working day in the year: that is 310 times, which gives us an annual task of writing, setting-up, and printing-off four hundred and sixty-five millions of letters.

This for a single newspaper. But there are the other daily papers, the Sunday papers, the weekly reviews, the magazines, and publications of all sorts, which make the figures astronomical and indeed incalculable. In view of this, what are we to think of our device for making every letter serve two purposes by doubling it? It is easy to say “It takes only a moment to write a letter of the alphabet twice instead once.” In fact it takes years, wears out tons of machinery, uses up square miles of paper and oceans of ink. By shortening a single common word instead of lengthening it we could save the cost of destroyers enough to make an impregnably guarded avenue across the Atlantic for our trade with America.

It may interest you to learn that your leading article contains 2,761 letters. As these letters represent only 2,311 sounds, 450 of them were superfluous and could have been saved had we a British alphabet. The same rate of waste on the 465,000,000 letters printed annually by The Times gives us 94,136,952 superfluous letters, every one of which has to be legible written or typed, read and set up by the monotypist, cast in metal, and machined on paper which has to be manufactured, transported, and handled. Translate all that into hours of labour at eight hours a day. Translate the labour into wages and salaries. I leave the task to The Times’ auditors, who, after staggering the proprietors with it, should pass it on to the Auditor-General to be elaborated into an estimate of the waste in the whole printing industry of the nation.

It is, I suppose, for lack of such an estimate that we do not think it worth while to lift a finger to get an English alphabet. The King, who has to spend an appreciable part of his time in signing his name. which in southern English has three sounds, and should be spelt with three letters, has to write six (100 per cent. waste of his time), with a result so equivocal that Herr Hitler speaks of him as King Gay Org. My surname has two sounds; but I have to spell it with four letters: another 100 per cent. loss of lime, labour, ink, and paper. The Russians can spell it with two letters, as they have an alphabet of 35 letters. In the race of civilization, what chance has a Power that cannot spell so simple a sound as Shaw against a rival that can?

At present we are in such pressing need of more man-power that we are driven to transfer our women from their special natural labour of creating life to the industry of destroying it. I wonder some female mathematician does not calculate how many men would be released from literary industry for war work by spelling the common words could and should with six letters instead of with 11 as we insanely do at present. Battles may be lost by the waste in writing Army orders and dispatches with multitudes of superfluous letters. The mathematicians changed from Latin numerals to Arabic years ago. The gain was incalculably enormous. A change from Latin to British letters would have equally incalculable advantages; but we, being incorrigibly brain lazy, just laugh at spelling reformers as silly cranks. It took the Four Years’ War to knock Summer Time into us. How many wars will it take to call our attention to the fact that there are shorter ways of spelling enuf than e-n-o-u-g-h?

Unfortunately, as most people write little and seldom, and read and spell by visual memory, not aurally, they are unconscious of any serious difficulty, and are only amused when some spelling reformer treats them to a few stale pleasantries about Frenchmen who, having been taught how to pronounce such a monstrosity as the spelling of though (six letters for two sounds), are then left to infer the pronunciation of through, cough, plough, &c., &c. We have endless exposures of the inconsistencies of our spelling and the absurdity of its pretence to etymology; but even professional writers who waste half their lives in blackening paper unnecessarily seem to have no grasp of the importance of our losses or the colossal figures into which they run.

Much work has already been done on the subject by inventors of phonetic shorthands, who have all had to begin by designing a 42-letter alphabet. The best of these, so far as I know, is that of our most eminent British phonetist, the late Henry Sweet, who had mastered all the systems, from Bell’s Visible Speech to Pitman’s; but, like all the rest, he proceeded to torture it into an instrument for verbatim reporting, and thereby made it difficult to learn, illegible, and useless for ordinary purposes. However, it is easy to discard his reporting contractions and use his alphabet in its simplicity. In my own practice I use Pitman’s alphabet in this way with a great saving of time and labour for myself personally; but it all has to be transcribed and set up in the spelling of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary.

The Orthological Institute has done invaluable service in calling attention to our waste of time by too much grammar through its invention of Basic English; but though the interest for foreign students is great, no British Government will ever be stirred to action in the matter until the economics of a phonetically spelt scientific and scholarly Pidgin are calculated and stated in terms of time, labour, and money.

Yours truly,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
Ayot St. Lawrence, Welwyn, Herts.