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e memory, whether he is to write _you_, or _yu_, or _yoo,_ or _ewe_, or _yew_, or _yue_, as in _flue_, or even _yo_ as in _do_, and to determine when and in what cases respectively he is to use those different forms? The truth is, that each elementary sound that enters into the composition of words is represented in our language by so many different combinations of letters, in different cases, that the child has very little clue from the sound of a syllable to guide him in the spelling of it. We ourselves, from long habit, have become so accustomed to what we call the right spelling--which, of course, means nothing more than the customary one--that we are apt to imagine, as has already been said, that there is some natural fitness in it; and a mode of representing the same sound, which in one case seems natural and proper, in another appears ludicrous and absurd. We smile to see _laugh_ spelled _larf,_ just as we should to see _scarf_ spelled _scaugh_, or _scalf_, as in _half_; and we forget that this perception of apparent incongruity is entirely the result of long habit in us, and has no natural foundation, and that children can not be sensible of it, or have any idea of it whatever. They learn, in learning to talk, what sound serves as the name by which the drops of water that they find upon the grass in the morning is denoted, but they can have no clue whatever to guide them in determining which of the various modes by which precisely that sound is represented in different words, as _dew, do, due, du, doo_, and _dou_, is to be employed in this case, and they become involved in hopeless perplexity if they attempt to imagine "_how it ought to be spelled_;" and we think them stupid because they can not extricate themselves from the difficulty on our calling upon them to "think!" No doubt there is a reason for the particular mode of spelling each particular word in the language--but that reason is hidden in the past history of the word and in facts connected with its origin and derivation from some barbarous or dead language, and is as utterly beyond the reach of each generation of spellers as if there were no such reasons in existence. There can not be the slightest help in any way from the exercise of the thinking or the reasoning powers. It is true that the variety of the modes by which a given sound may be represented is not so great in all words as it is in these examples, though with respect to a vast number of
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