Orthography Must be Balanced

The orthography of our language is extremely irregular; and many fruitless attempts have been made to reform it. The utility and expedience of such reform have been controverted, and both side of the question have been maintained with no inconsiderable zeal. On this subject, as on most others which divide the opinions of men, parties seem to have erred by running into extremes. The friends of a reform maintain that our alphabet should be rendered perfectly regular, by rejecting superfluous c...

 Simplified Spelling is Good for Americanization of the World

Foreners, when brought into personal association with those who speak English, easily learn to speak English themselvs. Its grammar is simple. It has great flexibility, due to its richness in terminology and its abundance of sinonims. It has an unsurpast litera- ture, making a knowledge of it desirable by those who hav no call to speak it. In every respect, except one, it is best fitted to be the language of sience, commerce, and international communication. The desirability of havi...

 Babies Categorize Sounds Before Words

As they hear us talk, babies are busily grouping the sounds they hear into the right categories, the categories their particular language uses. By one year of age, babies' speech categories begin to resemble those of the adults in their culture. Pat conducted some even more complicated experiments with Swedish babies using simple vowels to see how early they start organizing the sounds of their language in an adult-like way. She showed that at six months the process has already begun. The six...