The Miraculous Birth of Language
Preface
by Bernard Shaw
This book by Professor Wilson is one in which I should like everyone to be examined before being certified as educated or eligible for the franchise or for any scientific, religious, legal, or civil employment. My own profession is, technically, that of a master of language; and I have been plagued all my life by scientists, clergymen, politicians, and even lawyers, who talk like parrots, repeating words and phrases picked up from one another by ear without a moment’s thought about their meaning, and accept mere association of ideas as an easy substitute for logic. They are often good fellows and even clever fellows; but they are not rational. And they are incurably addicted to their personal habits, which they call human nature.
The main controversy in my early days was about Evolution. It was started by Charles Darwin, a great naturalist, who upset both the Evolutionists and the Edenists (now calling themselves Fundamentalists) by bringing forward an array of instances in which the changes attributed to divinely purposed evolutionary developments could be accounted for by what he called Natural Selection; that is, by circumstances favouring the survival and multiplication of whatever natural varieties happened to be fittest to survive in the general struggle for subsistence. It was as if someone had shown that the fact that most men’s hats fit them, usually accounted for by the belief that they were made on purpose to fit them, could be accounted for on the hypothesis that hats occur in nature like wild strawberries, and that men picking them up discard those that do not fit and retain and wear those that do.
Such a suggestion would have been received, one would suppose, as a clever jeu d’esprit, to be taken seriously only to the extent of its calling attention to the fact that along-side evolutionary development has gone on the chapter of accidents and of changes forced on living creatures by the need to adapt themselves to external circumstances instead of obeying the evolutionary urge. Yet in the middle of the nineteenth century it produced an intellectual revolution in the biological, clerical, and philosophical professions generally. They had been compelled on pain of ostracism and financial ruin to work, write, and think on the assumption that the apologues in the book of Genesis are statements of scientific tacts, and that the universe is the work of a grotesque tribal idol described in the book of Numbers as God, who resolves to destroy the human race, but is placated by a pleasant smell of roast meat brought to its nostrils by Noah. Any baptized and confirmed person questioning this Assumption could be, and still can be, indicted for apostasy, and sentenced to penalties as severe as those reserved for manslaughter and treason. The intensity of the revolt against this limitation among scientists, philosophers, and thinkers of all sorts can hardly be imagined nowadays.
Unfortunately, when a reaction is produced by unbearable persecution, people do not sit down to a judicial examination of their beliefs so as to retain what is valid in them. Instead, they perform the operation known as emptying the baby out with the bath. They do not weed the garden: they tear up everything that grows in it, flower and fruit and vegetable as well as weed, and throw them all on the compost heap. Much as the scientists and philosophers (the best of them were the same people) hated the Fundamentalist’s God, they had never been able to dispose satisfactorily of Paley’s puzzle. If you find something as full of purpose and contrivance as a watch, he argued, you know that it did not make itself: somebody must have contrived it and made it. Napoleon pointed to the stars and asked “Who made all that?” The only reply was: “Well, who made the maker?” Such logic chopping is not solid enough to stand against the mass of facts which seem contrived and designed. When Charles Darwin pointed out a host of instances in which a semblance of design had been produced by the chapter of accidents, the scientists embraced him as their deliverer. They threw over not only Noah’s idol, but all the other Scriptural attempts to personify or allegorize a creator as well.
They went further—far beyond Darwin, who was never a Darwinian. They lost their tempers if any one hinted that there was any purpose or design in the universe at all. They set up a creed called Determinism, compared to which the story of Noah was cheerful and encouraging. One of its tenets was a topsy-turvy view of Causation in which the cause was itself an effect, and could not help itself. Samuel Butler, a sheep farmer turned painter and painter turned philosopher, perceiving that Darwin had “banished mind from the universe,” made war on him with all the literary weapons at his command, which were considerable; but he was immediately ostracized as maliciously unscientific. Challenged to explain the difference between a live body and a dead one, the physiologists declared that there was no difference. Not only mind, but life of any sort, was banished from the universe; and Materialism went stark raving mad. The author of this book calls it Mechanistic; but the Materialists dislike the term; for a machine, like Paley’s watch, is a product of purpose and design; and this the ultra-Darwinians would not tolerate at any price.
The man in the street did not care. To him Darwin was a crank accusing him of being a developed ape. The religious sects found Genesis and St. Paul more comforting than pessimistic godlessness. A human society which, very wicked and evil in many ways, was redeemable by a blood sacrifice, and, since it was managing to survive, must be led in the long run by its saints rather than by its sinners, could at least bear thinking of, especially when it was borne in mind that our human life was only a brief purgatorial prelude to an eternity of bliss. But a wicked, evil, cruelly disease-ridden world which was also entirely senseless was a horror beyond words.
No matter. The most unwholesome food is welcome to the starving; and the scientific world gorged itself with Natural Selection. For the Bible was smashed at last. The thirty-nine articles were reduced to absurdity. People stopped going to church in all directions. Hell was abolished. Jehovah was exposed as an impostor whose real name was Jarvey. Science said so; and everything that Science said was true, and everything that the clergy said was false. Talk of emptying the baby out with the bath! Babies were emptied out by the dozen with the deluge. Herod’s massacre of the innocents was a joke in comparison.
Of course this was great nonsense; but it occurred for all that among people who were mentally active enough to be capable of a revolution in thought. A handful of people like Butler and myself saw that Natural Selection, far from being, as the public supposed, a discovery of something new called Evolution, was in fact a repudiation and castration of Evolution, depriving it of its moral basis in faith, hope, and charity; but our view went beyond the comprehension of the public, and some of our conclusions seemed irreconcilable. Though we were as anti-Edenist and anti-Paul as the crudest atheists and agnostics, we were classed with them and at the same time repudiated by them. Rousseau had said to the Churches: “Get rid of your miracles and the whole world will fall at the feet of Christ”; but we insisted that the world was full of miracles: for instance, the resurrection of life every spring was a miracle so stupendous that the cures of lameness and blindness, and even the raising of Lazarus of which Rousseau was thinking, were mere conjuring tricks in comparison.
It was very puzzling. How could people who were “infidels” believe in miracles and go far beyond the Bible in wonders and visions and prophecies? Infidels were people who did not believe in anything: how then could they have the face to call for an oceanic credulity as to the vital possibilities of the future? They do not believe in God, these people; yet here is this man Shaw telling us that if God becomes convinced that Man is a political failure, incapable of solving the problems raised by his own powers of reproduction and aggregation, God will supersede him by a new species as surely as the dinosaurs were superseded by Tom, Dick, and Harry, Jill, Jane, and Kate. What do they mean by God? What do we mean by God? The thirty-nine articles tell us that God has neither body, parts, nor passions, and that we must accept the Bible as His word, though it describes Him is having all three. We shall lose caste if we don’t go to church; but we shall gain it if we buy a motor car and drive in the country in it on Sunday; and, after all, the Smiths and Joneses have bought cars and have not been to church since; and no one has cut them for it.
As a run in the country brings better sermons from Nature than most persons can preach, perhaps the cars did more good than harm; but the balance was not always on that side. When Ibsen showed that our ideals were often poisonous, when the Socialists showed that our morals and economics were out-of-date and stale, when the Evolutionists and ultra-Darwinists alike made it impossible for any instructed person to accept the books of Moses as the work of a competent astrophysicist, over went all the baths and out went all the babies. Vivisectors claimed that science acknowledged no morals; plutocrats held that business is business and nothing else; Anacreontic writers put vine leaves in their hair and drank or drugged themselves to death; sadists and flagellomaniacs outfaced the humanitarians in the criminal courts; bright young things daubed their cheeks with paint and their nails and lips with vermilion, made love to soldiers, kept up their spirits with veronal tablets, and changed into battered old demireps in their twenties; adult suffrage tore the mask from the fabulous public opinion and democracy which Lincoln believed in and made the centre of his millennial hopes; statesmen found that the way to the Treasury bench was to “stoke up” public meetings with bunk, and get photographed smoking briarwood pipes or nursing babies whilst convincing the bankers and financiers that they could be trusted to change nothing; dictators superseded parliaments all over Europe, proscribing their enemies like Sulla, and organizing troops of young ruffians armed with irresistible modern weapons to impose their wills effectively: in short, all the aberrations that can occur in the absence of a common faith and code of honour occurred and are still occurring, including a monstrous war which no armistice can stop for longer than time enough for the disillusioned combatants to be superseded by a new generation of young dupes.
This very one-sided statement leaves out all that we have gained by our liberation from the pseudo-religious superstitions and pseudo-decent taboos and pruderies that had produced the reaction against Jehovah. That reaction was so monstrously overdone that, being itself a reaction, it produced a counter-reaction which is now taking the upper hand. It is not too much to say that St. Thomas Aquinas has now a wider vogue as a fashionable philosopher than he ever enjoyed before. The Church of England, which disgraced itself utterly during the Four Years War by turning its vestries into jingo recruiting stations, has redeemed itself by behaving very much better since the resumption of that war in 1939. Psychology, which had belied itself by treating belief in the existence of such a thing as a soul as quite as superstitious as a belief in the existence of God, is becoming really psychological, just as biology is becoming really biological, even medicine is following the lead of Scott Haldane, and beginning to regard a healthy body as a product of a healthy mind instead of the other way about. Butler, could he revisit us, would no longer find himself a boycotted crank. Even my own claims to be a biologist might not now be received with contemptuous incredulity by the biological profession. Obviously a playwright working on the Shakespearean plane in the great laboratory of the world with its uncontrived conditions, its innumerable untampered-with animals (mostly human) under observation, and its recorded history as I am, must be a biologist. Anyhow he can claim to know as much about the origins of life as the professionals, this being exactly nothing.
When I said many years ago that the Holy Ghost is the sole survivor of the Trinity, and that it is far more scientific to describe Man as the Temple of the Holy Ghost than as an automaton made of a few chemicals in which some carbon got mixed accidentally, I was accused of advertising myself by uttering paradoxes of the same order as the statement that black is white, which is not a paradox but a lie. Now that I am old and obsolescent, young people who happen to have heard about the paradoxical Shaw from their elders, and are tempted to read him, cannot find anything startling in me. If they have the requisite erudition, they point out that what I have said had been said long ago by St. Augustine and all the great spiritual leaders of mankind before and after him. They class me as a Quaker of sorts, and are not puzzled as their fathers were by the fact that Sir Arthur Eddington, great as an astronomer, is a professed Friend, that Faraday and Darwin were members of religious sects, and that the now somewhat forgotten Lucretian Irishman Tyndall, who startled the world at Belfast in 1874 by declaring that he saw in matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, is represented today by De Broglie, who scandalizes nobody by demonstrating what was plain enough to me in my teens: to wit, that if a dissolved salt can crystallize itself into a solid stone it is as much alive as the nearest squalling baby.
The Materialists, in fact, are faced with the discovery that there is no such thing as matter: a much greater advance than their grandfathers’ discovery that there is no such person as Old Nick with his horns, tail, cloven hoof, and pitchfork. As to the belief of the physicists, which so discouraged Dean Inge, one of the best brains of my time, that the sun is cooling and the earth must therefore end as a frozen lifeless moon strewn with the bones of the Last Men, Sir James Jeans, our Superphysicist, has suggested that the continuous slowing down of the heavenly) bodies by the tides must finally stop them in their orbits, whereupon, I suppose, they will all crash into one another as disabled airplanes crash to earth, and form a giant globe at a temperature never before reached, in which life will carry on its work just as it does on the floor of the ocean under pressures that no dry-land animal could endure for a moment.
It is a great relief to me to find that even the choice spirits among the college professors (still a literally God-forsaken lot) are ceasing to parrot obvious anti-clerical nonsense in the firm belief that they are teaching science. Imagine my delight when I received a copy of the first edition of this book inscribed by its author as “an instalment of interest on an old debt.” His name being unknown to me, I hastened to ascertain whether his chair was at Oxford or Cambridge, Owen’s or Edinburgh, Dublin or Birmingham. I learnt that it was at Saskatoon, a place of which I had never heard, and that his university was that of Saskatchewan, which was connected in my imagination with ochred and feathered Indians rather than with a university apparently half a century ahead of Cambridge in science and of Oxford in common sense.
Now I had noticed for some years past that American culture, which forty years ago seemed to subsist mentally on stale British literary exports, was more and more challenging our leadership, especially in science. When I learned that provincial Canada had drawn easily ahead of Pasteurized Pavloffed Freudized Europe, and made professors of men who were in the vanguard instead of among the stragglers and camp followers, I found myself considering seriously, especially when the German airmen dropped a bomb near enough to shake my house, whether I had not better end my days in Vancouver, if not in Saskatoon. Meanwhile I urged, as strongly as I could, the reprinting of Professor Wilson's treatise in a modestly priced edition baited for the British book market with a preface by myself: an overrated attraction commercially, but one which still imposes on London publishers.1
But I did not look at it commercially. I had an axe of my own to grind; and I thought Professor Wilson’s book might help me to grind it. I am not a professor of language: I am a practitioner, concerned with its technique more directly than with its origin. Professor Wilson described how Man was a baby, to whom Time and Space meant no more than the present moment and the few feet in front of his nose, until writable language made Time historical and Thought philosophical. Thought lives on paper by the pen, having devised for itself an immortal and ever-growing body. You will understand this when you have read the hook; and I hope you will appreciate its importance, and the magnitude of the service its author has done you.
Meanwhile, where do I come in? Solely as a technician. Professor Wilson has shown that it was as a reading and writing animal that Man achieved his human eminence above those who are called beasts. Well, it is I and my like who have to do the writing. I have done it professionally for the last sixty years as well as it can be done with a hopelessly inadequate alphabet devised centuries before the English language existed to record another and very different language. Even this alphabet is reduced to absurdity by a foolish orthography based on the notion that the business of spelling is to represent the origin and history of a word instead of its sound and meaning. Thus an intelligent child who is bidden to spell debt, and very properly spells it d-e-t, is caned for not spelling it with a b because Julius Caesar spelt the Latin word for it with a b.
Now I, being not only a scribe, but a dramatic poet and therefore a word musician, cannot write down my word music for lack of an adequate notation. Composers of music have such a notation. Handel could mark his movements as maestoso, Beethoven as mesto, Elgar as nobilmente, Strauss as etwas ruhiger, aber trotzdem schwungvoll und enthusiastich. By writing the words adagio or prestissimo they can make it impossible for a conductor to mistake a hymn for a hornpipe. They can write ritardando, accelerando and a tempo over this or that passage. But I may have my best scenes ridiculously ruined in performance for want of such indications. A few nights ago I heard a broadcast recital of The Merchant of Venice, in which Portia rattled through “How all the other passions fleet to air!” exactly as if she were still chatting with Nerissa and had been told by the producer to get through quickly, as the news had to come on at nine o’clock sharp. If that high spot in her part had been part of an opera composed by Richard Strauss a glance at the score would have saved her from throwing away her finest lines.
These particular instances seem impertinent to Professor Wilson’s thesis; but I cite them to show why, as a technician, I am especially concerned with the fixation of language by the art of writing, and hampered by the imperfections of that art. The professor’s conspectus of the enormous philosophical scope of the subject could not condescend to my petty everyday workshop grievances; but I may as well seize the opportunity to ventilate them, as they concern civilization to an extent which no layman can grasp. So let me without further preamble come down to certain prosaic technical tacts of which I have to complain bitterly, and which have never as far as I know been presented in anything like their statistical magnitude and importance.
During the last sixty years I have had to provide for publication many millions of words, involving for me the manual labor of writing, and for the printer the setting up in type, of tens of millions of letters, largely superfluous. To save my own time I have resorted to shorthand, in which the words are spelt phonetically, and the definite and indefinite articles, with all the prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections, as well as the auxiliary verbs, are not spelt at all, but indicated by dots and ticks, circles or segments of circles, single strokes of the pen, and the like. Commercial correspondence is not always written: it is often spoken into dictaphones which cost more than most private people can afford. But whether it is dictaphoned or written in shorthand it has to be transcribed in ordinary spelling on typewriters, and, if for publication, set up from the typed copy on a printing machine operated by a stroke of the hand for every letter.
When we consider the prodigious total of manual labor on literature, journalism, and commercial correspondence that has to be done every day (a full copy of the London Times when we are at peace and not short of paper may contain a million words) the case for reducing this labor to the lowest possible figure is, for printers and authors, overwhelming, though for lay writers, most of whom sprite only an occasional private letter, it is negligible. Writer’s cramp is a common complaint among authors: it does not trouble blacksmiths.
In what directions can this labor be saved? Two are obvious to anyone interested enough to give half an hour’s thought to the subject. 1. Discard useless grammar. 2. Spell phonetically.
Useless grammar is a devastating plague. We who speak English have got rid of a good deal of the grammatic inflections that make Latin and its modern dialects so troublesome to learn, but we still say I am, thou art, he is, with the plurals we are, you are, they are, though our country-folk, before school teachers perverted their natural wisdom, said I be, thou be, he be, we be, you be, they be. This saved time in writing and was perfectly intelligible in speech. Chinese traders, negroes, and aboriginal Australians, who have to learn English as a foreign language, simplify it much further, and have thereby established what they call business English, or, as they pronounce it, Pidgin. The Chinese, accustomed to an uninflected monosyllabic language, do not say “I regret that I shall be unable to comply with your request.” “Sorry no can” is quite as effective, and saves the time of both parties. When certain negro slaves in America were oppressed by a lady planter who was very pious and very severe, their remonstrance, if expressed in grammatic English, would have been “If we are to be preached at let us not be flogged also: if we are to be flogged let us not be preached at also.” This is correct and elegant but wretchedly feeble. It says in twenty-six words what can he better said in eleven. The negroes proved this by saying: “If preachee preachee: if floggee floggee; but no preachee floggee too.” They saved fifteen words of useless grammar, and said what they had to say far more expressively. The economy in words: that is, in time, ink, and paper, is enormous. If during my long professional career every thousand words I have written could have been reduced to less than half that number, my working lifetime would have been doubled. Add to this the saving of all the other authors, the scribes, the printers, the paper millers, and the makers of the machines they wear out; and the figures become astronomical.
However, the discarding of verbal inflections to indicate moods, tenses, subjunctives, and accusatives, multiplies words instead of saving them, because their places have to be taken by auxiliaries in such a statement as “By that time I shall have left England.” The four words “I shall have left” can be expressed in more inflected languages by a single word. But the multiplication of words in this way greatly facilitates the acquisition of the language by foreigners. In fact, nearly all foreigners who are not professional interpreters or diplomatists, however laboriously they may have learnt classical English in school, soon find when they settle in England that academic correctness is quite unnecessary, and that “broken English,” which is a sort of homemade pidgin, is quite sufficient for intelligible speech. Instead of laughing at them and mimicking them derisively we should learn from them.
In acquiring a foreign language a great deal of trouble is caused by the irregular verbs. But why learn them? It is easy to regularize them. A child’s “I thinked” instead of “I thought” is perfectly intelligible. When anybody says “who” instead of “whom” nobody is the least puzzled. But here we come up against another consideration. “Whom” may be a survival which is already half discarded; but nothing will ever induce an archbishop to say at the lectern “Who hath believed our report” and “to who is the arm of the Lord revealed?”
But it is not for the sake of grammar that the superfluous m is retained. To pronounce a vowel we have to make what teachers of singing call a stroke of the glottis. The Germans, with their characteristic thoroughness, do this most conscientiously: they actually seem to like doing it; but the English, who are lazy speakers, grudge doing it once, and flatly refuse to do it twice in succession. The archbishop says “To whom is” instead of “to who is” for the same reason as the man in the street, instead of saying Maria Ann, says Maria ran. The double coup de glotte is too troublesome. No Englishman, clerical or lay, will say “A ass met a obstacle.” He says “A nass met a nobstacle.” A Frenchman drops the final t in “s’ il vous plait” but pronounces it in “plaît-il?” Euphony and ease of utterance call for such interpolations.
I can give no reason for the Cockney disuse of final l. Shakespeare, accustomed to being called Bill by Anne Hathaway, must have been surprised when he came to London to hear himself called Beeyaw, just as I was surprised when I came to London from Ireland to hear milk called meeyock. Final r does not exist in southern English speech except when it avoids a coup de glotte. In that case it is even interpolated, as in “the idear of.” French, as written and printed, is plastered all over with letters that are never sounded, though they waste much labour when they are written.
The waste of time in spelling imaginary sounds and their history (or etymology as it is called) is monstrous in English and French; and so much has been written on the subject that it is quite stale, because the writers have dwelt only on the anomalies of our orthography, which are merely funny, and on the botheration of children by them. Nothing has been said of the colossal waste of time and material, though this alone is gigantic enough to bring about a reform so costly, so unpopular, and requiring so much mental effort as the introduction of a new alphabet and a new orthography. It is true that once the magnitude of the commercial saving is grasped the cost shrinks into insignificance; but it has not been grasped because it has never yet been stated in figures, perhaps because they are incalculable, perhaps because if they were fully calculated, the statisticians might be compelled to make the unit a billion or so, just as the astronomers have been compelled to make their unit of distance a light-year.
In any case the waste does not come home to the layman, for example, take the two words tough and cough. He may not have to write them for years, if at all. Anyhow he now has tough and cough so thoroughly fixed in his head and everybody else’s that he would be set down as illiterate if he wrote tuf and cof; consequently a reform would mean for him simply a lot of trouble not worth taking. Consequently the layman, always in a huge majority, will fight spelling reform tooth and nail. As he cannot be convinced, his opposition must be steamrollered by the overworked writers and printers who feel the urgency of the reform.
Though I am an author, I also am left cold by tough and cough; for I, too, seldom write them. But take the words though and should and enough: containing eighteen letters. Heaven knows how many hundred thousand times I have had to write these constantly recurring words. With a new English alphabet replacing the old Semitic one with its added Latin vowels I should be able to spell t-h-o-u-g-h with two letters, s-h-o-u-l-d with three, and e-n-o-u-g-h with four: nine letters instead of eighteen: a saving of a hundred per cent of my time and my typist’s time and the printer’s time, to say nothing of the saving in paper and wear and tear of machinery. As I have said, I save my own time by shorthand; but as it all has to go into long-hand before it can be printed, and I cannot use shorthand for my holograph epistles, shorthand is no remedy. I also have the personal grievance, shared by all my namesakes, of having to spell my own name with four letters instead of the two a Russian uses to spell it with his alphabet of thirty-five letters. All round me I hear the corruption of our language produced by the absurd device of spelling the first sound in my name with the two letters sh. London is surrounded by populous suburbs which began as homes or “hams” and grew to be hamlets or groups of hams. One of them is still called Peter’s Ham, another Lewis Ham. But as these names are now spelt as one word this lack of a letter in our alphabet for the final sound in wish, and our very misleading use of sh to supply the deficiency, has set every one calling them Peter Sham and Louis Sham. Further off, in Surrey, there is a place named Cars Halton. Now it is called Car Shallton. Horse Ham is called Horshm. Colt Hurst, which is good English, is called Coal Thirst, which is nonsense. For want of a letter to indicate the final sound in Smith we have Elt Ham called El Tham. We have no letter for the first and last consonant in church, and are driven to the absurd expedient of representing it by ch. Some day we shall have Chichester called Chick Hester. A town formerly known as Sisseter is so insanely misspelt that it is now called Siren.
But the lack of consonants is a trifle beside our lack of vowels. The Latin alphabet gives us five, whereas the least we can write phonetically with is eighteen. I do not mean that there are only eighteen vowels in daily use: eighteen hundred would be nearer the truth. When I was chairman of the Spoken English Committee of the British Broadcasting Corporation it was easy enough to get a unanimous decision that exemplary and applicable should be pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, though the announcers keep on putting the stress on the second all the same; but when the announcers asked us how they should pronounce cross or launch there were as many different pronunciations of the vowels as there were members present. I secured a decision in favor of my own pronunciation of launch by the happy accident that it was adopted by King George the Fifth when christening a new liner on the Clyde. But the members were perfectly intelligible to one another in spite of their ringing all the possible changes between crawz and cross, between lanch and lawnch. To get such common words as son and science phonetically defined was hopeless. In what is called the Oxford accent son and sun became san; sawed and sword are pronounced alike; and my native city becomes Dabblin. In Dublin itself I have heard it called Dawblin. The Oxford pronunciation of science is sah-yence: the Irish pronunciation is su-yence. Shakespeare pronounced wind as wined; and as late as the end of the eighteenth century an attempt to correct an actor who pronounced it in this way provoked the retort; “I cannot finned it in my minned to call it winned.” Rosalind is on the stage ridiculously pronounced Rozzalinned though Shakespeare called her Roh-za lined, rhyming it to “If a cat will after kind.” Kind, by the way, should logically be pronounced kinned. The word tryst is again so far out of use that nobody knows how to pronounce it. It should rhyme to triced, but is mostly supposed to rhyme to kissed. The first vowel in Christ and Christendom has two widely different sounds, sometimes absurdly described as long i and short i; but both are spelt alike.
I could fill pages with instances; but my present point is not to make lists of anomalies, but to show that (a) the English language cannot be spelt with five Latin vowels, and (b) that though the vowels used by English people are as various as their faces yet they understand one another’s speech well enough for all practical purposes, just as whilst Smith’s face differs from Jones’s so much that the one could not possibly be mistaken for the other yet they are so alike that they are instantly recognizable as man and man, not as cat and dog. In the same way it is found that though the number of different vowel sounds we utter is practically infinite yet a vowel alphabet of eighteen letters can indicate a speech sufficiently unisonal to be understood generally, and to preserve the language from the continual change which goes on at present because the written word teaches nothing as to the pronunciation, and frequently belies it. Absurd pseudo-etymological spellings are taken to be phonetic, very soon in the case of words that are seldom heard, more slowly when constant usage keeps tradition alive, but none the less surely. When the masses learn to read tay becomes tee and obleezh becomes oblydge at the suggestion of the printed word in spite of usage. A workman who teaches himself to read pronounces semi as see my. I myself, brought up to imitate the French pronunciation of envelope, am now trying to say enn-velope like everybody else.
Sometimes the change is an aesthetic improvement. My grandfather swore “be the varchoo” of his oath: I prefer vert-yoo. Edge-i-cate is less refined than ed-you-cate. The late Helen Taylor, John Stuart Mill’s stepdaughter, who as a public speaker always said Russ-ya and Pruss-ya instead of Rusher and Prussher, left her hearers awestruck. The indefinite article, a neutral sound sometimes called the obscure vowel, and the commonest sound in our language though we cannot print it except by turning an e upside down, was always pronounced by Mrs. Annie Besant, perhaps the greatest British oratress of her time, as if it rhymed with pay. In short we are all over the shop with our vowels because we cannot spell them with our alphabet. Like Scott, Dickens, Artemus Ward, and other writers of dialect I have made desperate efforts to represent local and class dialects by the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet, but found it impossible and had to give it up. A well-known actor, when studying one of my cockney parts, had to copy it in ordinary spelling before he could learn it.
My concern here, however, is not with pronunciation but with the saving of time wasted. We try to extend our alphabet by writing two letters instead of one; but we make a mess of this device. With reckless inconsistency we write sweat and sweet, and then write whet and wheat, just the contrary. Consistency is not always a virtue; but spelling becomes a will-o’-the-wisp without it. I have never had much difficulty in spelling, because as a child I read a good deal, and my visual memory was good; but people who do not read much or at all, and whose word memory is aural, cannot spell academically, and are tempted to write illegibly to conceal this quite innocent inability, which they think disgraceful because illiteracy was for centuries a mark of class.
But neither speech nor writing can now be depended on as class indexes. Oxford graduates and costermongers alike call the sun the san and a rose a rah-ooz. The classical scholar and Poet Laureate John Dryden said yit and git where we say yet and get: another instance of spelling changing pronunciation instead of simply noting it. The Duke of Wellington dropped the h in humble and hospital, herb and hostler. So did I in my youth, though, as we were both Irish, h-dropping as practised in England and France was not native to us I still say onner and our instead of honour and hour. Everybody does. Probably before long we shall all sing: “Be it ever so umbl there’s no place like ome,” which is easier and prettier than: “Be it evvah sah-oo hambl etc.”
I have dealt with vowels so far; but whenever an Englishman can get in an extra vowel and make it a diphthong he does so. When he tries to converse in French he cannot say coupé or entrez: he says coopay and ongtray. When he is in the chorus at a performance of one of the great Masses: say Bach’s in B minor, he addresses the Almighty as Tay instead of making the Latin e a vowel. He calls gold gah-oold. I pronounce it goh-oold. Price, a very common word, is sometimes prah-ees, sometimes prawce, sometimes proyce, and sometimes, affectedly, prace. That is why our attempts to express our eighteen vowels with five letters by doubling them will not work: we cannot note down the diphthongal pronunciation until we have a separate single letter for every vowel, so that we can stop such mispronunciations as reel and ideel for real and ideal, and write diphthongs as such. The middle sound in beat, spelt with two letters, is a single pure vowel. The middle sound in bite, also spelt with two letters, is a diphthong. The spelling l-i-g-h-t is simply insane.
The worst vulgarism in English speech is a habit of prefixing the neutral vowel, which phoneticians usually indicate by e printed upside down, to all the vowels and diphthongs. The woman who asks for “ə kapp ə tə-ee” is at once classed as, at best, lower middle. When I pass an elementary school and hear the children repeating the alphabet in unison, and chanting unrebuked “Ay-yee, Bə-yee, Cə-yee, Də-yee,” I am restrained from going in and shooting the teacher only by the fact that I do not carry a gun and by my fear of the police. Not that I cannot understand the children when they speak; but their speech is ugly; and euphony is very important. By all means give us an adequate alphabet, and let people spell as they speak without any nonsense about bad or good or right or wrong spelling and speech; but let them remember that if they make ugly or slovenly sounds when they speak they will never be respected. This is so well known that masses of our population are bilingual. They have an official speech as part of their company manners which they do not use at home or in conversation with their equals. Sometimes they had better not. It is extremely irritating to a parent to be spoken to by a child in a superior manner; so wise children drop their school acquirements with their daddies and mummies. All such domestic friction would soon cease if it became impossible for us to learn to read and write without all learning to speak in the same way.
And now what, exactly, do I want done about it? I will be quite precise. I want our type designers, or artist-calligraphers, or whatever they call themselves, to design an alphabet capable of representing the sounds of the following string of nonsense quite unequivocally without using two letters to represent one sound or making the same letter represent different sounds by diacritical marks. The rule is to be One Sound One Letter, with every letter unmistakably different from all the others. Here is the string of nonsense. An alphabet which will spell it under these conditions will spell any English word well enough to begin with.
Chang at leisure was superior to Lynch in his rouge, munching a lozenge at the burial in Merrion Square of Hyperion the Alien who valued his billiards so highly.
Quick! quick! hear the queer story how father and son one time sat in the house man to man eating bread and telling the tale of the fir on the road to the city by the sea following the coast to its fall full two fathoms deep. There they lived together served by the carrier, whose narrower mind through beer was sore and whose poor boy shivered over the fire all day lingering in a tangle of tactless empty instinct ineptly swallowing quarts of stingo.
As well as I can count, this sample of English contains 372 sounds, and as spelt above requires 504 letters to print it, the loss in paper, ink, wear and tear of machinery, compositors’ time, machinists’ time, and author’s time being over 26 per cent, which could be saved by the use of the alphabet I ask for. I repeat that this figure, which means nothing to the mass of people who, when they write at all, seldom exceed one sheet of notepaper, is conclusive for reform in the case of people who are writing or typing or printing all day. Calligraphers intelligent enough to grasp its importance will, if they have read these pages, rush to their drawing boards to seize the opportunity.
The first question that will occur to them is how many letters they will have to design; for it will seem only common sense to retain the twenty-six letters of the existing alphabet and invent only the ones in which it is deficient. But that can only serve it every letter in the twenty-six is given a fixed and invariable sound. The result would be a spelling which would not only lead the first generation of its readers to dismiss the writers as crudely illiterate, but would present unexpected obscenities which no decent person could be induced to write. The new alphabet must be so different from the old that no one could possibly mistake the new spelling for the old.
This disposes of all the attempts at “simplified spelling” with the old alphabet. There is nothing for it but to design twenty-four new consonants and eighteen new vowels, making in all a new alphabet of forty-two letters, and use it side by side with the present lettering until the better ousts the worse.
The artist calligraphers will see at first only an opportunity for forty-two beautiful line drawings to make a printed book as decorative as a panel by Giovanni da Udine, and a handwritten sonnet as delightful visually as one by Michelangelo, the most perfect of all calligraphers. But that will never do. The first step is to settle the alphabet on purely utilitarian lines, and then let the artists make it as handsome as they can. For instance, a straight line, written with a single stroke of the pen, can represent four different consonants by varying its length and position. Put a hook at the top of it, and you have four more consonants. Put a hook at the lower end, and you have four more, and put hooks at both ends and you have another four; so that you have sixteen consonants writable by one stroke of the pen. The late Henry Sweet, still our leading authority on British phonetics, begins his alphabet in this way, achieving at one stroke p, t, k, and ch; b, d, g (hard), and j; m, n, ng, and the ni in companion; kw, r, Spanish double l, and the r in superior. He takes our manuscript e and l (different lengths of the same sign) and gets f, s, and zh. Turning it backwards he gets v, z, and sh. He takes our c and o, and gets dh and th. A waved stroke gives him l; and thus, borrowing only four letters from our alphabet, he obtains the required twenty-four consonants, leaving twenty-two of our letters derelict. For vowels he resorts to long and short curves at two levels, with or without little circles attached before or after, and thus gets the requisite eighteen new letters easily. Thus the utilitarian task of inventing new letters has already been done by a first rate authority. The artists have only to discover how to make the strokes and curves pleasing to the eye.
At this point, however, the guidance of Henry Sweet must be dropped; for when he had completed his alphabet he proceeded to bedevil it into an instrument for verbatim reporting, which is the art of jotting down, not all the sounds uttered by a public speaker, which is beyond manual dexterity, but enough of them to remind the practised reporter of the entire words. He writes zah and depends on his memory or on the context to determine whether this means exact or example or examine or exasperate or what not. After seven years’ practice Sweet became so expert at this sort of guessing that the specimens he gives in his Manual of Current Shorthand (published by the Clarendon Press) are unreadable by any one lacking that experience.
This is true of all reporting systems. There are dozens of them in existence; and they are all efficient enough; for the debates of Cromwell’s Ironsides and the cross examinations of St. Joan are on record. Charles Dickens was a competent verbatim reporter before any of the systems now in use were invented. Sweet’s contractions and guessings were therefore quite superfluous: what was needed from him was an alphabet with which the English language could be unequivocally spelt at full length, and not a new reporting shorthand.
Now Sweet, being a very English Englishman, was extremely quarrelsome. Being moreover the brainiest Oxford don of his time, he was embittered by the contempt with which his subject, to say nothing of himself, was treated by his university, which was and still is full of the medieval notion, valid enough for King Richard Lionheart but madly out of date today, that English is no language for a gentleman, and is tolerable only as a means of communication with the lower classes. His wrath fell on his forerunner, Isaac Pitman, whose shorthand he called the Pitfall system. Pitman had anticipated Sweet’s strokes; but he made their interpretation depend on their thickness and the direction in which they were written. Thus a horizontal stroke meant k, and a vertical one t. The strokes slanting half-way between meant p and ch. The same strokes thickened gave him g, d, b, and j, with the addition of r for ch written upward instead of downward. Thus he got nine letters from the single stroke, and would have got ten if an upstroke could be thickened, which is not possible as a feat of penmanship. Sweet discarded these distinctions because, as no two people write at the same slant, the stroke should have only one meaning no matter at what slant it is written. Making strokes at different slants is drawing, not writing; Sweet insisted that writing must be currente calamo: hence he called his script Current Shorthand. Thick and thin he discarded as unpractical for upstrokes and pencil work. His getting rid of these elaborations was an important improvement. The distinctions he substituted were those to which the old printed alphabet has accustomed us. In it the stroke projects sometimes above the line of writing, as in the letter l, sometimes below it as in the letter j, sometimes neither above nor below as in the letter i, sometimes both above and below, as in our manuscript p, f, and capital j. This gave Sweet only four letters per simple stroke instead of Pitman’s nine; but four are more than enough. Also much of the pen work imposed by our alphabet is unnecessary: for instance, m and w take twice as long to write as l though they can be indicated quite as briefly, and p and q could be indicated by their projecting strokes alone without attaching an n to the p and an o to the q.
I take it then that the new English alphabet will be based on Sweet, and not on Pitman, though I am writing this preface in Pitman’s shorthand and not in Sweet’s, having discarded Pitman’s reporting contractions as unnecessary for my purpose and puzzling for my transcriber. The designer of the new alphabet will find that Sweet has done all the preliminary study for him, and solved its utilitarian problems.
What remains to be done is to make the strokes and hooks and curves and circles look nice. If very young, the designer may ask me indignantly whether I think of the beauty sought by artists as something to be stuck on to the inventions of the pedant. In this case it is. An architect has to make a house beautiful; but the house, if it is to be lived in, must be dictated by the needs of its inhabitants and not by the architect’s fancies. The great printers, Jensen, Caslon, Morris, did not invent letters: they made the old ones pleasing as well as legible, and made books worth looking at as well as reading. What they did for the old alphabet their successors must do for the new. There is plenty of scope tor invention as well as for decoration: for instance, Sweet’s alphabet has no capitals nor has Pitman’s. Neither has any italics. Since Morris revived printing as a fine art, scores of new types have come into the market. Morris himself designed several.
The new alphabet, like the old, will not be written as printed: its calligraphers will have to provide us with a new handwriting. Our present one is so unwritable and illegible that I am bothered by official correspondents asking me to write my name “in block letters, please,” though a good handwriting is more legible and far prettier than block, in which the letters, being the same height, cannot give every word a characteristic shape peculiar to itself. Shakespeare’s signature, though orthographically illegible, is, when once you have learnt it, much more instantaneously recognizable and readable than SHAKESPEARE, which at a little distance might be CHAMBERLAIN or any other word of eleven letters.
Other changes and developments in the use of language and the art of writing may follow the introduction of an English alphabet. There is, for instance, the Basic English of the Orthological Institute at 10 King’s Parade, Cambridge, by which foreigners can express all their wants in England by learning 800 English words. It is a thought-out pidgin, and gets rid of much of our grammatical superfluities. The institute is, as far as I know, the best live organ for all the cognate reforms, as the literary societies and academies do nothing but award medals and read historical and critical lectures to one another.
The various schools of shorthand teach new alphabets; but they are wholly preoccupied with verbatim reporting, which is a separate affair. Their triumphs are reckoned in words per minute written at speeds at which no language can be fully written at all. They train correspondence clerks very efficiently; but they should pay more attention to authors and others whose business it is to write, and who cannot carry secretaries or dictaphones about with them everywhere. Such scribes can write at their own pace, and need no reporting contractions, which only waste their time and distract their attention, besides presenting insoluble puzzles to the typist who has to transcribe them. I have long since discarded them. On these terms shorthand is very easy to learn. On reporting terms it takes years of practice to acquire complete efficiency and then only in cases of exceptional natural aptitude, which varies curiously from individual to individual.
The only danger I can foresee in the establishment of an English alphabet is the danger of civil war. Our present spelling is incapable of indicating the sounds of our words and does not pretend to; but the new spelling would prescribe an official pronunciation. Nobody at present calls a lam a lamb or pronounces wawk and tawk as walk and talk. But when the pronunciation can be and is indicated, the disputable points will be small enough for the stupidest person to understand and fight about. And the ferocity with which people fight about words is astonishing. In London there is a street labelled Conduit Street. When the word conduit, like the thing, went out of use, cabmen were told to drive to Cundit Street. They are still so told by elderly gentlemen. When modern electric engineering brought the word into common use the engineers called it con-dew-it. A savage controversy in the columns of The Times ensued. I tried to restore good humour by asking whether, if the London University decided to pay a compliment to our oriental dominions by calling one of its new streets Pundit Street it would be spelt Ponduit Street. I had better have said nothing; for I was instantly assailed as a profane wretch trifling with a sacred subject. Englishmen may yet kill one another and bomb their cities into ruin to decide whether v-a-s-e spells vawz or vahz or vaiz. Cawtholic or Kahtholic may convulse Ireland when the national question is dead and buried. We shall all agree that h-e-i-g-h-t is an orthographic monstrosity; but when it is abolished and we have to decide whether the official pronunciation shall be hite or hyth, there will probably be a sanguinary class war; for in this case the proletarian custom is more logical than the Oxford one.
Still, we must take that risk. If the introduction of an English alphabet for the English language costs a civil war, or even, as the introduction of summer time did, a world war, I shall not grudge it. The waste of war is negligible in comparison to the daily waste of trying to communicate with one another in English through an alpahabet with sixteen letters missing. That must be remedied, come what may.
Ayot St. Lawrence,
23rd February 1941
1This preface by Mr. Bernard Shaw appeared in the Guild Book edition (15.) of Professor Wilson’s book, publication of which has had to be discontinued after the sale of 50,000 copies owing to the shortage of paper. We are indebted to Mr Shaw for permission to include the preface in this reissue of the original edition. — Publishers’ note