THE ENGLISH ALPHABET
DICTIONARIES
We all know the saying of a wise man who lived more than two thousand years ago: «Of making many books there is no end». If he had been living today, he might have said the same of dictionaries, for several new ones appear every year. They are needed for various purposes. Even in our own language we often find it necessary to look up a word, sometimes for the spelling, sometimes for the pronunciation, or it may be for the meaning or origin of the word.
In the twentieth century, with the remarkable increase in scientific and other knowledge, special dictionaries have to be made for special groups of words — commercial, technical, psychological, medical etc. There are some very large dictionaries which are supposed to contain all the words of the language, but they are not convenient to use. They are too heavy and take too much room. If you are studying one subject, it is much better to have a dictionary which is no bigger than an ordinary book.
Students of a foreign language need a dictionary which ontains all the words in common use in their own lan-uage and the one they are trying to learn, that is, the ords they are likely to hear in conversation, and on the adio, and those they will meet in the books and newspa-iers they read. Suchdictionaries usually give the mean-ng of aword by translatingit; and, sometimes, butnot always, they give translations of phrases and structures. Dictionaries of this kind are useful to translators, but less useful to earnest students of language than dictionaries which give meanings and explanations and examples in the foreign language itself.
Are you one of those unfortunate people who speak English very well but at once become worried when your teacher asks you to write? Don't be worried. Remember that a lot of English people have the same problem. Near my home there are at least two notices wrongly spelt and a lot of English people who are otherwise quite clever have to use dictionaries. What is wrong with this, for example: «Ould cars bought here»? The problem is this silly spelling, of course. As all those who read, know it just isn't logical.
Why isn 't English spelling logical ? The answer is that it isn't really spelling that is «wrong». Hundreds of years ago the English pronounced wolds as they spelt them. In many cases it is the pronunciation that has changed. Why not change the spelling to fit the new pronunciation? Of course we have thought of that too.
In 1843 Isaac Pitman, who invented shorthand, proposed a new alphabet of forty symbols. To make spelling fit pronunciation you need a different symbol for each sound. But you can use the same alphabet with just a few new symbols. Then leaving out silent letters like k in knife you just write the words as they sound. Kat for cat, etc. This is what Pitman wanted to do. Another idea is to use a completely different alphabet — phonetic alphabet.
This what George Bernard Shaw wanted. When he died he left money to pay for this, and in 1962 Androcles the Lion came out in a phonetic alphabet using forty-eight symbols.
But a hundred years after Isaac Pitman the English alphabet hasn 't changed. It would need a lot of money to change it. Think of all the books in schools and libraries and the printing machines. Then too there are those who really like our ridiculous spelling. There is in fact one new alphabet in use, the I. T. A or Initial Teaching Alphabet. The idea behind this is that children learn to read more quickly without the problems of English spelling. Reading early is important because by reading we can learn about other things. In many of our schools children learn to read with this new alphabet and learn the old alphabet later.
Some teachers don't like it. They say that the children will never learn to spell «properly».
Meanwhile the latest news is that the Simplified Spelling Society of Britain and the Simplified Spelling Association of USA have put their hands together. They think that English is becoming the most important language in the world and so we need logical spelling. They hope to publish a book explaining their ideas and proposing another new alphabet of forty-four symbols. The name of the book? «World English».