Society for Pure English, Tract 02 - On English Homophones by Robert Seymour Bridges;Society for Pure English
page 42 of 94 (44%)
page 42 of 94 (44%)
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The telephone, which seems to lower the value of differentiating
consonants, has revealed unsuspected likenesses. For instance the ciphers, if written somewhat phonetically as usually pronounced, are thus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 nawt wun too three fawr faiv six sev'n eit nain by which it will be seen that the ten names contain eight but only eight different vowels, 0 and 4 having the same vowel _aw_, while 5 and 9 have _ai_. Both these pairs caused confusion; the first of them was cured by substituting the name of the letter O for the name of the zero cipher, which happens to be identical with it in form,[9] and this introduced a ninth vowel sound _ou_ (= owe), but the other pair remained such a constant source of error, that persons who had their house put on the general telephonic system would request the Post Office to give them a number that did not contain a 9 or a 5; and it is pretty certain that had not the system of automatic dialling, which was invented for quite another purpose, got rid of the trouble, one of these two ciphers would have changed its name at the Post Office. [Footnote 9: There is a coincidence of accidents--that the Arabic sign for zero is the same with our letter O, and that the name of our letter O (= owe) is the same as the present tense of _ought_, which is the vulgar name (for nought) of the Arabic zero, and that its vowel does not occur in the name of any cipher.] [Sidenote: Æsthetic objections.] In the effect of uniformity it may be said that utilitarian and |
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