The superior legibility of lower case forms over all upper case.

(p. 44) The new alphabet, like the old, will not be written as printed: its calligraphers will have to provide us with a new handwriting. Our present one is so un-writable and illegible that I am bothered by official correspondents asking me to write my name "in block letters, please," though a good handwriting is more legible and far prettier than block, in which the letters, being the same height, cannot give every word a characteristic shape peculiar to itself. Shakespeare's signature, though orthographically illegible, is, when once you have learnt it, much more instantaneously recognizable and readable than SHAKESPEARE, which at a little distance might be CHAMBERLAIN or any other word of eleven letters. Other changes and developments in the use of language and the art of writing may follow the introduction of an English alphabet. There is, for instance, the Basic English of the Orthological Institute at 10, King's Parade, Cambridge, by which foreigners can express all their wants in England by learning 8oo English words. It is a thought-out pidgin, and gets rid of much of our grammatical superfluities. The Institute is, as far as I know, the best live organ for all the cognate reforms, as the literary Societies and Academies do nothing but award medals and read historical and critical lectures to one another.

(p. 45) The various schools of shorthand teach new alphabets; but they are wholly preoccupied with verbatim reporting, which is a separate affair. Their triumphs are reckoned in words per minute written at speeds at which no language can be fully written at all. They train correspondence clerks very efficiently; but they should pay more attention to authors and others whose business it is to write, and who cannot carry secretaries or dictaphones about with them everywhere. Such scribes can write at their own pace, and need no reporting contractions, which only waste their time and distract their attention, besides presenting insoluble puzzles to the typist who has to transcribe them. I have long since discarded them. On these terms shorthand is very easy to learn. On reporting terms it takes years' of practice to acquire complete efficiency and then only in cases of exceptional natural aptitude, which varies curiously from individual to individual.

The only danger I can foresee in the establishment of an English alphabet is the danger of civil war. Our present spelling is incapable of indicating the sounds of our words and does not pretend to; but the new spelling would prescribe an official pronunciation. Nobody at present calls a lam a lamb or pronounces / wawk / and / tawk / as *walk and *talk. But when the pronunciation can be and is indicated, the disputable points will be small enough for the stupidest person to understand and fight about. And the ferocity with which people fight about words is astonishing. In London there is a street labeled Conduit Street. When the word conduit, like the thing, went out of use, cabmen were told to drive to Cundit Street. They are still so told by elderly gentlemen. When modem electric engineering brought the word into common use the engineers called it con-dew-it. A savage controversy in the columns of The Times ensued. I tried to restore good humor by asking whether, if the London University decided to pay a compliment to our Oriental dominions by calling one of its new streets Pundit Street it would be spelt Pon-duit Street. I had better have said nothing; for I was instantly assailed as a profane wretch trifling with a sacred subject. Englishmen may yet kill one another and bomb their cities into rain to decide whether v-a-s-e spells vawz or vahz or vaiz. Cawtholic or Kahtholic may convulse Ireland when the national question is dead and buried. We shall all agree that h-e-i-g-h-t is an orthographic monstrosity; but when it is abolished and we have to decide whether the official pronunciation shall be hite or hyth, there will probably be a sanguinary class war; for in this case the proletarian custom is more logical than the Oxford one.

(p. 47) Still, we must take that risk. If the introduction of an English alphabet for the English language costs a civil war, or even, as the introduction of summer time did, a world war, I shall not grudge it. The waste of war is negligible in comparison to the daily waste of trying to communicate with one another in English through an alphabet with sixteen letters missing. That must be remedied, come what may.

Ayot St. Lawrence, 1940

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