On the English Language; Past and Present (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1858 edition. Excerpt: ... WRITING AND PRINTING. 193 LECTURE V. CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OP ENGLISH WORDS. When I announce to you that the subject of my lecture to-day will be English orthography, or the spelling of words in our native language, with the alterations which this has undergone, you may perhaps think with yourselves that a weightier, or, if not a weightier, at all events a more interesting, subject might have occupied this our concluding lecture. I can not admit it to be wanting either in importance or in interest. Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well engage, as it often has engaged, the attention of those with far higher acquirements than any which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by faults in the manner of treating it; but I am sure it ought as little to be this, and would never prove so in competent hands. Let us, then, address ourselves to this matter, not without good hope that it may yield us both profit and pleasure. I know not who it was that said: " The invention of printing was very well; but, as compared to the invention of writing, it was no such great matter after all." Whoever it was who made this observation, it is clear that for him use and familiarity had not obliterated the wonder which there is in that, whereat we probably have long ceased to wonder at all--the power, namely, of representing sounds by written signs, of reproducing for the eye that which existed at first only for the ear: nor was the estimate which he formed of the relative value of these two inventions other than a just one. Writing, indeed, stands more nearly on a level with speaking, and deserves rather to be compared with it, than with printing -- which, with all its utility, is yet of altogether another and inferior type of greatness; or, if this...