Excerpt from The British Academy, Vol. 6: On the Relations Between Spoken and Written Language With Special Reference to English The preceding discussion, however, has entirely ignored one con sideration that is of the utmost importance. There is no doubt that those unphonetic features of our spelling, which have their practical value for the educated adult, do add enormously to the difficulty of learning to read and write. The waste of time in education caused by the want of consistent relation between the written and the spoken word is a serious evil, which urgently calls for a remedy. After all, it is the interest of the learner, not that of the person who has mastered all the difficulties, that has the first claim to consideration. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.