CHAPTER X.

READING.

THIS art should be taught simultaneously with writing, or, more properly, printing; and I should certainly advise that it do not come till children are hard upon seven years old, if they have entered the Kindergarten at three. For it properly belongs to the second stage of education, after the Kindergarten exercises on the blocks, sticks, peas, &c., are entirely exhausted; and the children have become very expert in sewing, weaving, pricking, and drawing. They will then have received a certain cultivation of intellect which will make it possible to teach Reading on a philosophical method, which will make the acquisition a real cultivation of mind, instead of the distraction it now is to those whose vernacular is English, the _pot pourri_ of languages, and whose _orthography_ should be called _Kakography_, it is so lawless.

Though we repudiate phonography, so far as to deprecate its being applied to the English language, and reducing all our libraries to a dead language as it were, we are not insensible to the truth that _phonography_ is the true principle of writing; and this method of ours takes advantage of it to a certain extent, as we shall proceed to show: for if we pronounce the vowel-characters as in the Italian language, and the letters c and g hard, it is a fact that the largest number of syllables in English will be found strictly phonographic. It was on this hint, given by a great philologist, that the "First Nursery Reading Book" was written, which has no word in it that makes an exception to the letters so sounded. In my own Kindergarten, where I began to teach reading when I was yet ignorant of the necessity for the previous training of which I have just given account, I began to teach on this method, reading and writing at the same time; thus:--

All the children were set before the black-board, with their slates and pencils; and I said, "What does the cat say?" The answer was immediately ready,--"mieaou." Now this sound goes from the highest to the lowest of the Italian vowels, beginning with the consonant m.

I said, "Now we will learn to print 'mieaou.' How does it begin?" I answered myself,--shutting my lips, and sounding m. They all imitated the sound, which, being a semi-vowel, was continuous.

I said, "We will write m," putting down three short perpendiculars, and joining them on top by a horizontal; and I made the letter myself, according to this direction, and they imitated with more or less success.

I then said, "_mi_," sounding the i as in mach_i_ne; and adding, "Now we must write i,--and that is one little short perpendicular with a dot over it." I did it, and they imitated.

Then I said "mie," sounding e as in egg, only making it long; "and this e is made by a curve and straight line,"--at the same time making it on the black-board, which they imitated.

Then I said "miea," sounding a as in ah; and, as I made it on the black-board, I said, "We will make a little egg; and over the egg we will make a dot, and that is a snake's head; and this is the body," I continued, as I made the curve that completed the a. They imitated with indifferent success, but I did not criticise their scrawls.

Then I said, "mi[)e]a_o_," and making the o, they imitated it easily.

Then I said, "mieao_u_," sounding the u not _yu_, but like u in Peru; and they imitated sound and character.

It proved quite an entertainment to repeat this lesson, till they were very expert. The next day I made them tell me the sounds, one by one, as I had done to them; and I wrote the letters. I also would write it, letter by letter; and they would sound first, m, then the syllable mi, then mie, then miea, then mieao, then mieaou. When they were perfectly familiar with these sounds and characters, I told them these letters were called vowels, or vocals, because they were the sounds of the voice.

In another lesson, I asked them how they made the sound m, and helped them to say that they did it by putting their lips together, and sounding without opening them; for I wanted the power of the character and not the name,--_em_; and then I said, "Now tell me how shall I write mama?" which they also wrote on their slates.

I then said that the lips made another motion when they began to say papa; that they were put together and opened without any sound of the voice at all,--at the same time showing it myself on my own lips. And I told them to write the letter p by making a straight perpendicular line, twice as long as the lines that made m; and then, at the upper right hand, drawing their upper lip,--also doing it myself for them to imitate. I then told them to put on an a after it, then another p, and then another a; and now they had papa.

I said, "You have now _articulated_ with your lips two sounds, but you can make more articulations with your lips. You can put your lips just as you do to make p; and then, if you sound a little, you will make b; and when you write b, you can make a perpendicular line as you did to make p, but instead of putting an upper lip to it, put an under lip on the lower right-hand side of it;" and I showed how to do it on the black-board, and saw that they imitated it on the slate.

The next day I began with calling on them to write the vowels, dictating by the sounds I had given them; and then the lip letters, m, p, and b.

I then said, "But there are two more articulations with lips--Put your upper teeth on your lower lip and breathe" (articulating f at the same time). They imitated, and I said, "Now make a perpendicular line and cross it, and then make the top of the line bend over a little; that is the letter f" (I gave the power, not name, ef). "Now put your lip as before and breathe again, making a little sound, and instead of f it will be v. The letter v is printed by two short obliques meeting at the bottom. Now you can make all the lip letters, m, p, b, f, v."

For exercise in printing, and to make sure of these letters and sounds, I told them to write ma, pa, ba, fa, va, always keeping the Italian sounds of the vowel; also, me, pe, be, fe, ve; mi, pi, bi, fi, vi; mo, po, bo, fo, vo; and mu, pu, bu, fu, vu.

Another lesson was the tooth letters d, t, s. Here the teeth must be set together, and a sound made for d; and the lip put behind the perpendicular in printing it; the teeth put together, the articulation t is made without putting any voice to it. The teeth put together, and a hissing sound makes s. The letter can be described as a snake, the head on the right and the tail on the left of the curl: z is still more easily made by three lines.

These letters can be made fast in the memory, by dictating di, de, da, do, du; ti, te, ta, to, tu; si, se, sa, so, su; and zi, ze, za, zo, zu.

Then attention is drawn to throat letters. The easiest to make is h. Let them see that the sound is breathed out of their throats, and do not give it the name of _aitch_. They can write ha, hi, he, ho, and hu; and then make the sound k, and show them how it is written: sometimes k, sometimes q, and sometimes c; and do not call c _see_. Make them write ca, co, cu; ka, ke, ki, ko, ku; and qua, que, qui, quo.

Show them how to write the sonorous throat letter in go, ga, gu. It will be very easy for them to make the nose sound n, and write the letter by two short perpendiculars, joined on top by a horizontal line; the tongue sound l and the rolling r are also easily sounded and written. In a week's lessons, or possibly a fortnight's, these letters can all be learned; but it is of no consequence if it takes a month.

Another way of learning the letters is given on a subsequent page (the 79th); but this has the advantage of being a little more scientific, and exercising the classifying instinct, which has been considerably developed by the exercises involved in the occupations.

On account of the irregularity of what is called English orthoepy and orthography, the written language is a chaos--into which, when the child's mind is introduced in the usual way, all its natural attempts at classification are baffled. The late Horace Mann, in a lecture on the alphabet, has with great humor and perspicacity shown this; and he recommended that children should be taught to read by _words_ purely. But when some years afterwards his attention was drawn to the phonic method, he accepted it fully; and wrote for Mrs. Mann the preface to her Philadelphia edition of the Primer of Reading and Drawing. This was not until after it had been tested in his own family and some others, where I had introduced the phonic method.

On the details of my method I must enlarge all the more, because I find myself differing in some respects from Mr. Sheldon's plan, which loses a large part of the advantages of the phonic method by not having one definite sound for each letter. As I have taught on my plan successfully for fifteen years, I am prepared to defend it at all points, from the ground of a various experience. But I can adduce also the highest philologic authority for my mode of sounding the alphabet,[E] as well as an argument of common sense from the nature of the case.

The primal cause of the chaotic condition of English orthography, is the fact that the Roman alphabet, which was a perfect phonography of the old Latin language, lacked characters for four English vowels and four English consonants. The Latin monks had not the wit to invent new characters for these additional sounds; but undertook to use the Roman letters for them also. Hence for the vowel heard in the words irk, err, work, and urge, they used indifferently all four characters; for truly one would do as well as another. But if they had put a dot into the middle of the o, and added it to the alphabet, it would have been better than either. Also, if for the vowel sound of pun, they had put a dot under the u; and for the vowel sound of man, they had put a dot under the a; and for the vowel sound of not, a dot under the o; they would have had four more letters in their alphabet, which would have completed the phonography of the English vowels. Similar dots under d t s c would have made a phonography of consonants, and avoided the awkward combinations of sh, ch, and the ambiguity of th, which now stands for the differing initials of _then_ and _thin_.

But as they did not do this, a certain divorce took place between the ideas of the sounds and the letters; and hence the long uncertainty of the English orthography, and the stereotyped absurdities which now mark it.

It is so nearly impossible to remedy a difficulty which has passed into print so largely, that we have to accept the evil, and remedy as best we may the disadvantage it is to young minds to have all this confusion presented to them on the threshold of their literary education.[F]

It was suggested to me by Dr. Kraitsir, that I should take a volume of any book, and count the times that each of the vowels, and c and g, were sounded as the Romans sounded them, and how many times they were sounded otherwise, and thus see whether it was true, as he said, that these Roman sounds were the most frequent, even in the English language. I did so on a few pages of Sir Walter Scott's novels, and found that the