"Mark Twain. A simplified alphabet (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

twenty-six letters of our alphabet consumed about eighty pen-strokes for
their construction--about three pen-strokes per letter.

It is THREE TIMES THE NUMBER required by the phonographic alphabet. It
requires but ONE stroke for each letter.

My writing-gait is--well, I don't know what it is, but I will time
myself and see. Result: it is twenty-four words per minute. I don't mean
composing; I mean COPYING. There isn't any definite composing-gait.

Very well, my copying-gait is 1,440 words per hour--say 1,500. If I
could use the phonographic character with facility I could do the 1,500 in
twenty minutes. I could do nine hours' copying in three hours; I could do
three years' copying in one year. Also, if I had a typewriting machine with
the phonographic alphabet on it--oh, the miracles I could do!

I am not pretending to write that character well. I have never had a
lesson, and I am copying the letters from the book. But I can accomplish my
desire, at any rate, which is, to make the reader get a good and clear idea
of the advantage it would be to us if we could discard our present alphabet
and put this better one in its place--using it in books, newspapers, with
the typewriter, and with the pen.

[Figure 6] --MAN DOG HORSE. I think it is graceful and would look
comely in print. And consider--once more, I beg--what a labor-saver it is!
Ten pen-strokes with the one system to convey those three words above, and
thirty-three by the other! [Figure 6] I mean, in SOME ways, not in all. I
suppose I might go so far as to say in most ways, and be within the facts,
but never mind; let it go at SOME. One of the ways in which it exercises
this birthright is--as I think--continuing to use our laughable alphabet
these seventy-three years while there was a rational one at hand, to be had
for the taking.

It has taken five hundred years to simplify some of Chaucer's rotten
spelling--if I may be allowed to use to frank a term as that--and it will
take five hundred years more to get our exasperating new Simplified
Corruptions accepted and running smoothly. And we sha'n't be any better off
then than we are now; for in that day we shall still have the privilege the
Simplifiers are exercising now: ANYBODY can change the spelling that wants
to.

BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE PHONOGRAPHIC SPELLING; THERE ISN'T ANY WAY. It
will always follow the SOUND. If you want to change the spelling, you have
to change the sound first.

Mind, I myself am a Simplified Speller; I belong to that unhappy guild
that is patiently and hopefully trying to reform our drunken old alphabet by
reducing his whiskey. Well, it will improve him. When they get through and
have reformed him all they can by their system he will be only HALF drunk.
Above that condition their system can never lift him. There is no competent,