29. Franklin’s Influence on Sir William Jones and Noah Webster

The first part of Chapter 29 is devoted to examining the influence of Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling (RMS) on his friend and fellow Whig, Sir William Jones. In particular, it considers the possibility that Franklin’s work and their discussions may have inspired Jones to produce his groundbreaking treatise, A Dissertation on the Orthography of Asiatick Words in Roman Letters (1786), in which he proposed a phonetic alphabet to transliterate non-European languages. Franklin and Jones had known each other for many years and met biweekly on Thursday nights at St. Paul’s Coffeeshop in London, in a gathering Franklin dubbed the “Club of Honest Whigs” among whom were Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. These meetings which continued until Franklin’s departure in 1775, covered a wide range of topics, from science and literature to religion and politics, and it is highly likely that discussions of language arose – particularly since Franklin conceived his RMS in 1768 and 1772, the year Priestley’s influential The Rudiments of Grammar was published.The second half of the chapter examines Franklin’s influence on Noah Webster and his life-long effort to promote a unified, national model of American English pronunciation based on New England English. Webster’s overtly nationalistic goals, however, contained a powerful Anglo-centric element revealing that even American patriots were emotionally bound to England and its culture. The chapter explains how Webster sought to preserve the “purity” of English as it had been spoken during England’s “golden age,” that is, a period which he dated to 1727, the final year of George I’s reign. He believed that this ideal form of spoken English had been best preserved in New England. Contrary to his predecessors, his own variety was the foundation for his model rather than contemporary London English, which he considered to be in full decline on account of the numerous innovations.Correspondence between the two men, never before published (cf. Appendix 4), is also discussed and focuses on their disagreements regarding the nature of the reform and the model of pronunciation to be adopted.