Benjamin Franklin, who by the age of seventeen had become a printer and is known as one of the fathers of the new nation, spent a good deal of his time concerned with American spelling. He read the essays of Thomas Addison in the English Spectator to improve his style. Though he was a great defender of American English, when David Hume, the philosopher, criticised his use of “colonise” and “unshakable,” he withdrew them. Yet he had a radical view of the language and wanted to get rid of letters he thought unnecessary — c, w, y and j — and add six others. He wanted to remove silent letters and
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