|
|
Noah Webster
Biography of a simplified spelling advocate By: STEVE T. BETT, Ph.D. Source: Sensible Spelling Website at http://pages.whowhere.com/community/sbett Noah Webster (1758-1843), along with his friend and contemporary Ben Franklin (1706-1790), advocated simplified spelling, and developed an alphabetic notation that reflected pronunciation.
Webster advocated alphabetic spelling but was unable to make much progress in this direction beyond the removal of a few superfluous letters. Nevertheless, he was the most influential and successful spelling reformer since Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). Johnson's (1755) Dictionary was his point of departure and while he criticized it, his alternations were minor and became less radical with each new edition of his dictionaries. Webster championed "American spelling," and added such words such as "skunk," "squash," "hickory," "lengthy," and "chowder" to the lexicon.
After graduating from Yale, Webster took a post as a schoolmaster in rural Glastonbury, and and later in West Hartford, Connecticut to earn a living. Webster thought that children should be learning from books, more precisely American books, and authored one of the first textbooks for children pedantically titled: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. It was popularly known as the blue-backed speller because of its cover.
For 100 years, Noah's popular book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. Ben Franklin used it to teach his granddaughter how to read.
His early success in 1782 with the blue-backed spelling book earned him a steady income and the wherewithal to devote his life to the first American dictionary, published in 1806. A second enlarged edition with less radical simplified spellings was published in 1828.
When Noah was 43, he started writing the first American dictionary. He did this because Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced and used words differently. He thought that all Americans should speak the same way. He also thought that Americans should not speak and spell just like the English.
In a show of patriotism typical of the early years of the new republic of the United States, Webster wanted a dictionary to record the English language as spoken on this side of the Atlantic. This was the angle that permitted Webster to throw in a few streamlined spellings of words and deviate from the standards set by Ben Johnson in his 1755 dictionary.
The earnest pedant felt that the English writing system compromised the alphabet and it was the duty of lexicographers to right the system by removing superfluous letters.
(quote)
Webster wanted the American language to be somewhat uniform. And he wanted it to be easy. Although he ultimately had to abandon Ben Franklin's idea of changing the spelling of ''tongue'' to ''tung'' and women to ''wimmen,'' the lexicographer did prevail with many simplified spellings that Americans use to this day.
It is thanks to Webster that Americans have "catalog" instead of "catalogue," ''honor'' instead of ''honour,'' ''music'' instead of ''musick,'' and ''plow'' instead of ''plough.''
He changed ''theatre'' and ''centre'' to the more sensible ''theater'' and ''center.'' But Webster had realized that language, no matter how deplored, is irreversible, and that casual street words do mingle uninvited in our conversation and never leave.
He added a total of 50 American words like "skunk" to his ''Compendious Dictionary,'' and another 5,000 words in common English usage on both sides of the ocean that had previously been considered too ordinary to be included in any dictionary.
Webster worked out a system of diacritics to supply a guide to pronunciation and he gave rules for pronunciation, hoping at best to partially standardize American speech, or at least avoid the worst excesses in England of class divisions and incomprehensible regional patois.
By 1828 the enlarged version of his original dictionary was ready. He had added, by this time, 12,000 words never previously included in any dictionary of our language. Complete with definitions, it was considered better than Samuel Johnson's 1755 English masterpiece in scope and authority. While highly praised, at $20 it was much too costly for most American households. He tried a second printing at $15 two years before his death in 1843.
Publishing rights were purchased by the Merriam-Webster Co. who published an inexpensive edition in 1847. It was only after this $6 dictionary became available that dictionaries became commonplace in the United States.
Biography click to read the source page for the following
Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758, in the West Division of Hartford. Noah's was an average colonial family. His father farmed and worked as a weaver. His mother worked at home. Noah and his two brothers, Charles and Abraham, helped their father with the farm work. Noah's sisters, Mercy and Jerusha, worked with their mother to keep house and to make food and clothing for the family.
Few people went to college, but Noah loved to learn so his parents let him go to Yale, Connecticut's only college. He left for New Haven in 1774, when he was 16. Noah's years at Yale coincided with the Revolutionary War. Because New Haven had food shortages during this time, many of Noah's classes were held in Glastonbury.
Noah graduated in 1778. He wanted to study law, but his parents could not afford to give him more money for school. So, in order to earn a living, Noah taught school in Glastonbury, Hartford and West Hartford. Later he studied law.
Noah did not like American schools. Sometimes 70 children of all ages were crammed into one-room schoolhouses with no desks, poor books, and untrained teachers. Their books came from England. Noah thought that Americans should learn from American books, so in 1783, Noah wrote his own textbook: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Most people called it the "Blue-backed Speller" because of its blue cover.
For 100 years, Noah's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time. Ben Franklin used Noah's book to teach his granddaughter to read.
In 1789, Noah married Rebecca Greenleaf. They had eight children. Noah carried raisins and candies in his pockets for the children to enjoy. The Websters lived in New Haven, then moved to Amherst, MA. There, Noah helped to start Amherst College. Later the family moved back to New Haven.
When Noah was 43, he started writing the first American dictionary. He did this because Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced and used words differently. He thought that all Americans should speak the same way. He also thought that Americans should not speak and spell just like the English.
Noah used American spellings like "color" instead of the English "colour" and "music" instead of "musick". He also added American words that weren't in English dictionaries like "skunk" and "squash". It took him over 27 years to write his book. When finished in 1828, at the age of 70, Noah's dictionary had 70,000 words in it.
In later life, Webster was critical of the politics of self aggrandizement. Webster clearly set himself with the founders who believed that if a man was dependent financially on someone, he could not serve the public good, but would only be concerned about his dependent relationship. It was only a man who had no economic interests and sought no economic advantage who could serve well.
According to his biographers, Noah did many things in his life. He worked for copyright laws, wrote
textbooks, Americanized the English language, and edited magazines. When Noah Webster died in 1843
he was considered an American hero.
Local (relative) links Spelling Links SiteMap-index Remote (absolute) links Spelling Links SiteMap-index
spell-sitemap-L spelling links phon-inv-art2.html
