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THE ALPHABET AND SIMPLIFIED SPELLING
ADDRESS AT THE DINNER GIVEN TO MR. CARNEGIE AT THE DEDICATION
OF THE NEW YORK ENGINEERS' CLUB, DECEMBER 9, 1907
Mr. Clemens was introduced by the president of the club, who,
quoting from the Mark Twain autobiography, recalled the day
when the distinguished writer came to New York with $3 in small
change in his pockets and a $10 bill sewed in his clothes.
It seems to me that I was around here in the neighborhood of the Public
Library about fifty or sixty years ago. I don't deny the circumstance,
although I don't see how you got it out of my autobiography, which was
not to be printed until I am dead, unless I'm dead now. I had that $3 in
change, and I remember well the $10 which was sewed in my coat. I have
prospered since. Now I have plenty of money and a disposition to
squander it, but I can't. One of those trust companies is taking care of
it.
Now, as this is probably the last time that I shall be out after
nightfall this winter, I must say that I have come here with a mission,
and I would make my errand of value.
Many compliments have been paid to Mr. Carnegie to-night. I was
expecting them. They are very gratifying to me.
I have been a guest of honor myself, and I know what Mr. Carnegie is
experiencing now. It is embarrassing to get compliments and compliments
and only compliments, particularly when he knows as well as the rest of
us that on the other side of him there are all sorts of things worthy of
our condemnation.
Just look at Mr. Carnegie's face. It is fairly scintillating with
fictitious innocence. You would think, looking at him, that he had never
committed a crime in his life. But no--look at his pestiferious
simplified spelling. You can't any of you imagine what a crime that has
been. Torquemada was nothing to Mr. Carnegie. That old fellow shed some
blood in the Inquisition, but Mr. Carnegie has brought destruction to the
entire race. I know he didn't mean it to be a crime, but it was, just
the same. He's got us all so we can't spell anything.
The trouble with him is that he attacked orthography at the wrong end.
He meant well, but he, attacked the symptoms and not the cause of the
disease. He ought to have gone to work on the alphabet. There's not a
vowel in it with a definite value, and not a consonant that you can hitch
anything to. Look at the "h's" distributed all around. There's
"gherkin." What are you going to do with the "h" in that? What the
devil's the use of "h" in gherkin, I'd like to know. It's one thing I
admire the English for: they just don't mind anything about them at all.
But look at the "pneumatics" and the "pneumonias" and the rest of them.
A real reform would settle them once and for all, and wind up by giving
us an alphabet that we wouldn't have to spell with at all, instead of
this present silly alphabet, which I fancy was invented by a drunken
thief. Why, there isn't a man who doesn't have to throw out about
fifteen hundred words a day when he writes his letters because he can't
spell them! It's like trying to do a St. Vitus's dance with wooden legs.
Now I'll bet there isn't a man here who can spell "pterodactyl," not even
the prisoner at the bar. I'd like to hear him try once--but not in
public, for it's too near Sunday, when all extravagant histrionic
entertainments are barred. I'd like to hear him try in private, and when
he got through trying to spell "pterodactyl" you wouldn't know whether it
was a fish or a beast or a bird, and whether it flew on its legs or
walked with its wings. The chances are that he would give it tusks and
make it lay eggs.
Let's get Mr. Carnegie to reform the alphabet, and we'll pray for him--
if he'll take the risk. If we had adequate, competent vowels, with a
system of accents, giving to each vowel its own soul and value, so every
shade of that vowel would be shown in its accent, there is not a word in
any tongue that we could not spell accurately. That would be competent,
adequate, simplified spelling, in contrast to the clipping, the hair
punching, the carbuncles, and the cancers which go by the name of
simplified spelling. If I ask you what b-o-w spells you can't tell me
unless you know which b-o-w I mean, and it is the same with r-o-w, b-o-r-
e, and the whole family of words which were born out of lawful wedlock
and don't know their own origin.
Now, if we had an alphabet that was adequate and competent, instead of
inadequate and incompetent, things would be different. Spelling reform
has only made it bald-headed and unsightly. There is the whole tribe of
them, "row" and "read" and "lead"--a whole family who don't know who they
are. I ask you to pronounce s-o-w, and you ask me what kind of a one.
If we had a sane, determinate alphabet, instead of a hospital of
comminuted eunuchs, you would know whether one referred to the act of a
man casting the seed over the ploughed land or whether one wished to
recall the lady hog and the future ham.
It's a rotten alphabet. I appoint Mr. Carnegie to get after it, and
leave simplified spelling alone.
Simplified spelling brought about sun-spots, the San Francisco
earthquake, and the recent business depression, which we would never have
had if spelling had been left all alone.
Now, I hope I have soothed Mr. Carnegie and made him more comfortable
than he would have been had he received only compliment after compliment,
and I wish to say to him that simplified spelling is all right, but, like
chastity, you can carry it too far. |
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