DIVISION OF WORDS

The division of words when the words do not exactly fit the register of the line has always been a source of trouble.  In the days of the manuscript makers devices such as crowding letters, reducing their size, or omitting them altogether were freely used and words were arbitrarily divided when the scribes so desired.  During the greater part of the time every scribe divided as he pleased, often in ways which seem very strange to us, like the Greek custom of dividing always after a vowel and even dividing words of one syllable.  With the invention of printing, however, the number of these devices was greatly diminished.  It became a matter of spacing out the line or dividing the word.  Of course that meant frequent word division and called for a systematization of rules with regard to this division.  These rules for division are necessarily based on spelling and syllabication.

SPELLING

The idea that there is one right way to combine the letters representing a certain sound or group of sounds, that is a word, and that all other ways are wrong and little short of shameful is a comparatively new idea among us.  The English speaking folk held down to a comparatively recent time that any group of letters which approximately represented the sound was amply sufficient as a symbol of the word.  This sort of phonetic spelling was commonly followed, and followed with great freedom.  No obligation was recognized to be consistent.  In ordinary writing, such as letters and the like, it is not unusual to find the same word spelled in a variety of ways in the same document.

The last century has brought about an attempt to standardize spelling into conventional forms any departure from which is regarded as highly derogatory to the writer.  In many cases these forms are fixed arbitrarily, and in some there is even now disagreement among the highest authorities.  These difficulties and disagreements have two reasons:  First, English is a composite language, drawn from many sources and at many periods; hence purely philological and etymological influences intervene, sometimes with marked results, while there is a difference of opinion as to how far these influences ought to prevail.  Second, the English language uses an alphabet which fits it very badly.  Many letters have to do duty for the expression of several sounds, and sometimes several of them have nearly or quite the same sound.  For example, there are a number of distinct sounds of a, i, and o while g is sometimes indistinguishable from j and c from k.  This is not always a matter of modification of sounds by the sounds of other letters combined with them.  One has to learn how to pronounce cough, dough, enough, and plough, the ough having four distinct sounds in these four words.  Each