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Updated: May 14, 2025
What the Society asks for is not a list of lost words that are interesting in themselves: we need rather definite instances of good dialect words which are not homophones and which would conveniently supply wants.
Instead of building with the arrow-head a multitude of syllabic characters, including many homophones, as had been and continued to be the custom with the Assyrians, the Persians selected a few of these characters and ascribed to them phonetic values that were almost purely alphabetic.
What seems clear about it is that the two contending pronunciations are homophones, one with latches the other with lashes. But there seems no propriety in the SS being changed to Z. The pronunciation látchess would save it from its awkward and absurd homophone latches, and would be in order with prowess, largess, noblesse, &c.
Henry Bradley's lecture to the British Academy 'On the relations between spoken and written language' , and they will see that the Society's Tract II, on 'English Homophones', illustrates the unpractical nature of any scheme either of pure phonetics in the printing of English books, or even of such a scheme as is offered by 'the Simplified Spelling Society'; because the great number of homophones which are now distinguished by their different spellings would make such a phonetic writing as unutilitarian as our present system is: moreover, if it were adopted it would inevitably lead to the elimination of far more of these homophones than we can afford to lose; since it would enforce by its spelling the law which now operates only by speech, that homophones are self-destructive.
The decipherment of this character, however, even with this aid, proved enormously difficult, for it was soon evident that here it was no longer a question of a nearly perfect alphabet of a few characters, but of a syllabary of several hundred characters, including many homophones, or different forms for representing the same sound.
'The damp gust makes the ivy whir', whir rhyming here with executioner. If churn is anywhere dialectal for churr, it must have come from the common mistake of substituting a familiar for an unknown word: and this is the worst way of making homophones. 'goistering daws'.
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