Amended Spellings from 1800s

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, far more has been said about spelling reform than I could possibly summarize here.

But you’re going to try.

No, I want to mention one little aspect of it.

In the back of the Century Dictionary, which, as a matter of fact, is more than a century old, there is a list of several thousand words which they call amended spellings.

It can’t mean very much until you understand that these were part of a spelling reform movement from that time period, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.

Thousands.

Thousands.

Wow.

So William, Dwight, Whitney and a couple of the editors thought that they had enough influence to change English.

Good luck.

And so they’re not only in the back in an appendix, but they’re also sprinkled throughout the text alphabetically where they would otherwise belong.

And so they will direct you if you look up this modified spelling to the more traditional spelling of the word.

And this came to my mind because I was contemplating the influence of Noah Webster, who in his own dictionaries changed some spelling.

He decided that American English should break away from British English.

Right.

Lose the U.

And some of it stuck.

It didn’t all stick, but some of it stuck.

And ever since then, certain dictionary editors and lexicographers have considered that perhaps they too could have as much influence as Noah Webster.

And the allure of having that kind of impact on the language that comes out of pens and keyboards and mouths is too much for them to resist.

And, of course, absolutely none of these spellings from the Century Dictionary, none of them have caught on.

Not a one.

It’s the usual tripe and claptrap.

They think that English is complicated and if we simplified it and only made it look like it sounds and everything okay.

And they always forget the fundamental problem with, of course, they mean their English, the dialect that they speak.

Exactly.

And they’re not taking into account that even in this great continent of ours, we speak a dozen dialects.

And they’re very different in some case, maybe more than a dozen if you want to count some of the variations there.

And so I’m looking here in this list, and you’ll love this.

This is one of the reasons why the spelling reform movement has never caught on.

They do things like this.

Their variant spelling of deafened, the traditional spelling is D-E-A-F-E-N-E-D, right?

They decide that the new spelling, the amended spelling, is D-E-F-E-N-D.

What?

So they’ve re-spelled an O word to look exactly like another old word.

That’s ridiculous.

It’s senseless.

They did it again with banned, B-A-N-N-E-D, like the book was banned.

They now spell it, of course, B-A-N-D.

But that’s even more confusing.

That’s exactly my point.

In their search for clarity, they have like these 24 rules with the 10 guiding principles, and they’ve got all this great, you know, you could just hear like the stuffiness and the overeducation at work.

Don’t get me wrong.

William Dwight Whitney was brilliant.

It’s a beautiful dictionary.

It’s wonderful.

It’s a top work.

It’s a top work.

But this is not representative of their top work.

Anyway, so I was thinking about spelling reform.

Noah Webster has had the most influence.

There is no other lexicographer or editor that’s come anywhere near it.

It’s partly because we are now fractured as a society.

We speak differently.

We control our own language more.

We have more of a personal handhold on it, but partly because the path has been ruined by failed efforts like this.

Call us with your thoughts about language, 1-877-929-9673, or email us.

The address is spelled W-A-Y-W-O-R-D radio dot org.