alternatehistory.com

"I once heard Dr. Franklin remark, 'that those people spell best, who do not know how to spell'; that is, they spell as their ears dictate, without being guided by rules, and thus fall into a regular orthography." --Noah Webster

If Noah Webster had never been born, would American spelling still diverge from British? With Webster, I think we have no right to say with any assurance "If he hadn't done it, somebody else would have." Great as was the prestige of his "blue back speller" and later of his famous *American Dictionary of the English Language* ("so often, like Hope and Crosby, Morocco-bound" as David Daniell remarked in *The Bible in English*) both books had rivals, and in particular for years Worcester's Dictionary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Emerson_Worcester upheld traditional (i.e., Johnsonian) spelling. Webster himself, being as George Philip Krapp pointed out, "above all a practical, not a theoretical reformer" was in fact slow to adopt the reforms he had early advocated.

The fact is that most spelling reformers, both in Great Britain and the United States, have failed. (Think of George Bernard Shaw, Andrew Carnegie, and Theodore Roosevelt.) Webster was one of the few to at least partly succeed. "Partly," because many of his innovations failed to take root, even in the United States, and he himself abandoned some of them like "iland" instead of "island"). As H. L Mencken noted in *The American Language* (1921):

"But though he was thus forced to give occasional ground, and in more than one case held out in vain, Webster lived to see the majority [in later editions, Mencken changed this to "many"--DT] of his reforms adopted by his countrymen. He left the ending in -or triumphant over the ending in -our, he shook the security of the ending in -re, he rid American spelling of a great many doubled consonants, he established the s in words of the defense group, and he gave currency to many characteristic American spellings, notably jail, wagon, plow, mold and ax. These spellings still survive, and are practically universal in the United States today [I think "practicaly universal" is an exaggeration in the case of "ax"--DT]; their use constitutes one of the most obvious differences between written English and written American...

"Webster's reforms, it goes without saying, have not passed unchallenged by the guardians of tradition. A glance at the literature of the first years of the nineteenth century shows that most of the serious authors of the time ignored his new spellings, though they were quickly adopted by the newspapers. Bancroft's *Life of Washington* contains -our endings in all such words as honor, ardor and favor. Washington Irving also threw his influence against the -or ending, and so did Bryant and most of the other literary big-wigs of that day. After the appearance of *An American Dictionary of the English Language,* in 1828, a formal battle was joined, with Lyman Cobb and Joseph E. Worcester as the chief opponents of the reformer. Cobb and Worcester, in the end, accepted the -or ending and so surrendered on the main issue, but various other champions arose to carry on the war. Edward S. Gould, in a once famous essay, 14 denounced the whole Websterian orthography with the utmost fury, and Bryant, reprinting this philippic in the *Evening Post*, said that on account of Webster 'the English language has been undergoing a process of corruption for the last quarter of a century,' and offered to contribute to a fund to have Gould's denunciation 'read twice a year in every school-house in the United States, until every trace of Websterian spelling disappears from the land.' But Bryant was forced to admit that, even in 1856, the chief novelties of the Connecticut schoolmaster 'who taught millions to read but not one to sin' were 'adopted and propagated by the largest publishing house, through the columns of the most widely circulated monthly magazine, and through one of the ablest and most widely circulated newspapers in the United States'--which is to say, the *Tribune* under Greeley. The last academic attack was delivered by Bishop Coxe in 1886, and he contented himself with the resigned statement that 'Webster has corrupted our spelling sadly.'..." http://www.bartleby.com/185/32.html

(Webster, a leading Federalist, also wrote an influential defense of the new Constitution in 1787: https://books.google.com/books?id=YJo0AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover But I'll assume it would have been ratified without him...)

[1] Of course I am aware that Worcester had worked with Webster, that Webster accused him of plagiarism, etc. Without Webster, indeed, Worcester might have gone into a different field. However, I am not saying that without Webster, Worcester would have become a major American lexicographer. All I am saying is that the success of Worcester's dictionary shows that there was still support for more traditional spelling than Webster's, support that would presumably have been catered to by another dictionary if Worcester had not been around. Such support could have been decisive against any spelling reformer who didn't have Webster's prestige.
Top