At the Conference on Spelling at the Society of Arts,
on Tuesday, a letter was read from Mr. Lowe advising the addition of fifteen lettere to the alphabet, and remarking that if that had been done, boys who had passed in the sixth stan- dard would not read so badly as they do to him when he engages them for that purpose ; while Mr. Isaac Pitman com- plained that o and a had seven sounds each, and that 102 combinations of letters represented 269 sounds. Another speaker (Mr. W. Storr) deprecated any proposal to change the pronunciation of words,—he would reform the spelling only, and not attack the more difficult problem of reforming the pronunciation ; and another gentlemen was very severe on the word " debt" for its b, denying that it came from the Latin "debitum," and asserting that it came from the French " dette." We have separated elsewhere the practicable proposals from the wild and impracticable complaints of this rather anarchic " Con- ference," but we may add our impression that the thorough- going reformers would not be really satisfied without turning the spelling of the language into a genuinely phonetic one, abolishing all other modes of spelling, reprinting all our popular literature in the language as so altered, and compelling all the world to read and quote it in the travestied shape it would then take.
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