Jacob Grimm, etymologist, of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1785–1863): ‘Did not a whimsical, antiquated orthography stand in the way, the universality of [English as a world language] would be still more evident’. Sir James Murray, first compiler of The Oxford English Dictionary, wrote of ‘the waste of national resources incurred in the attempt to make child after child commit to memory the 20,000 contradictory facts of English spelling’. In Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language. ‘Neither the Anglo-Saxon orthography nor the Old French was distinguished for its regularity. But when the two were thrown together, the result was a mass of confusion and anomaly hardly paralleled, except, perhaps, in the spelling of the native Irish. It is not creditable to the English name, nor accordant with the practical spirit of the English people.’ ‘English orthography poorly fulfils the original and proper office of orthography, to indicate pronunciation; nor does it better fulfil the improper office, which some would assert for it, for a guide to etymology.’ Noah Webster, the original compiler, campaigned for simpler spelling for a long time, before largely giving up. H W Fowler, in Modern English Usage, 1926, complained of ‘the notorious difficulty of English spelling, and the growing impatience caused by it. English had better be treated in the English way . . . amended in detail, here a little and there a little as absurdities become intolerable, till a result is attained that shall neither overburden schoolboys nor stultify intelligence nor outrage the scholar. In this book some modest attempts are made at cleaning up the more obtrusive untidinesses’. Richard Venezky, doyen of experts on American English spelling: ‘Everyone . . . has to admit that of all languages of culture English has the most antiquated, inconsistent and illogical spelling. Educators, philologists, and spelling reformers have from the darkest periods of the Middle Ages joined in the assault on the ‘‘antiquated’’, ‘‘inconsistent,’’ and ‘‘illogical’’ spelling with which the English speaking world is burdened’. He then tried to justify it.
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