Page:Handbook of simplified spelling.djvu/21

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MOVEMENT TO IMPROVE IT
13

creast, a Bulletin was issued, addresses wer made, articles wer written, and in these and other ways the members "set themselves to produce and concentrate dissatisfaction with the old spelling". The recommendations of the American Philological Association, which included certain changes in the alfabet, and many simplifications of spelling, wer adopted. A special list of 11 words, ar, catalog, definit, gard, giv, hav, infinit, liv, tho, thru, wisht, was approved for immediate use, with particular emfasis on kav, giv, liv.

The desirability of the reform of English spelling was urged, previous to 1880, by several State Teachers' Associations, by many influential journals, and by men of such eminent scolarship as President F. A. P. Barnard, of Columbia; President Noah Porter, of Yale; President D. C. Oilman, of Johns Hopkins; Professor A. P. Peabody, of Harvard ; and Professor James Hadley, of Yale.

British Teachers and Filologists Organize
The National Union of Elementary Teachers, repre- senting about 10,000 teachers in England and Wales, past almost unanimously, in 1876, a resolution in favor of a royal commission to inquire into the subject of English spelling with a view to reforming and simplifying it.

A British Spelling Reform Association was organized in 1879, with A. H. Sayce, professor of filology, Oxford, as president; and with Alexander Bain, professor of logic, Aberdeen; Charles Darwin; Alexander J. Ellis, president of the Philological Society (London) ; J. H. Gladstone, sientist and author of "Spelling Reform" (1878); John Lubbock; J. A. H. Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; Isaac Pit-