Simplified Spelling

Protesting against "the levity and lesemajeste" of an editorial in the London Times about the late King George V's spelling, an eminent Briton whose notions are always news wrote a letter to The Thunderer:

You have failed to appreciate . . . the laudable and sensible attempts of our Sovereign's royal father to spelg the English language as it ought to be spelt. . . . The English language cannot be spelt, because there is no English alphabet. We make shift with a Latin alphabet. . .

Our attempts to make a foreign alphabet of 26 letters do the work of 42 are pitiable. We write the same vowel twice to give it a different sound. . . . We also double the following consonant ... or make two consonants represent simple sounds . . . for which the Latin alphabet does not provide. . . . Those who think this a satisfactory solution overlook the stupendous fact that it takes twice as long to write two letters as to write one. . . .

It may interest you to learn that your leading article contains 2,761 letters. As these letters represent only 2,311 sounds, 450 of them were superfluous and could have been saved had we a British alphabet. The same rate of waste on the 465,000,000 letters printed annually by the Times gives us 94,136,952* superfluous letters, every one of which has to be legibly written . . . read . . . set up . . . cast. . . and machined. . . .

The King has to spend an appreciable part of his time in signing his name, which should be spelt with three letters . . . with a result so equivocal that Herr Hitler speaks of him as King Gay Org. My surname has two sounds; but I have to spell it with four letters. . . . What chance has a Power that cannot spell so simple a sound as Shaw? . . .

Yours truly,

G. Bernard Shaw

*The mathematical calculations appear to be off by 4%.

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