Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician

About this book

Benjamin Franklin has been hailed as an inventor, scientist, printer, author, philosopher, diplomat, philanthropist and political activist and, especially, a founding father of the United States, but few are aware he was also a phonetician. This volume offers a groundbreaking exploration of Franklin’s little-studied linguistic legacy—his Reformed Mode of Spelling (1768/1779). In this short treatise, Franklin outlined a plan for a radical, phonetically-based modernization of the English spelling system that would simultaneously serve as a pronunciation guide for what he envisaged to be 'correct' English as well as a practical scheme allowing the unlettered and foreigners to learn to read and write ‘within a week’. The social and sociolinguistic reasons for its inception as well as what that model entailed linguistically are the focus of this book. Moreover, while Franklin’s fascination with English orthographic reform is known among specialists, previous studies have rarely taken his reform seriously. This is the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of his phonetic system within the broader historical and sociolinguistic context of early American English, a study which also incl…