Otto Jespersen (1938), En Sprogmands Levned
(A Linguist's Life, English translation by David Stoner)
« As for me personally, I must confess that, although my interest in an international language is lively enough, it has happened several times that it has lain fallow for a couple of years at a time, when I have been more occupied with other major linguistic projects. Such a pause occurred trom 1932 to 1934; but in the first issue of the journal Novialiste in 1934 I wrote a long article on Novial in which I was able to regard my own product with fresh critical eyes, more or less as if it were another man's work, and I proposed some not inconsiderable amendments, especially by introducing an "orthographic" Novial alongside the original phonetically written language. In my foreword to Novial Lexike I had already hinted that the use or c before a, o, u with the sound value [k] would be much more tolerable than the use of this letter in Esperanto and Ido in this position with the pronunciation [ts]. I now inserted c and sc in the place which they have in the orthography of English, French, and other languages, i.e. civil, disciple, comunica, crise, cluse, etc., and similarly z in zone and so on, where I formerly wrote s and k. The reason that I had not ventured to do this earlier was that, following the example of Esperanto, Ido, and Occidental, I had persuaded myself that a special pronunciation [ts] had to be given to c in civil, etc, and likewise that the voiced pronunciation of z would be required. But I now realized that this was not necessary at all: one could simply pronounce c as the French and English do, and z as Danes and Swedes do, = [s]. I retained the sound values of the words as in the original Novial, and merely in the writing took another step along the same road towards the international form that had already been started by the use of qu and x. Thus the sound [k], besides being represented by the letters k and q and the first part of x, also acquired the new sign c (before a, o, u and consonants), a practice with which nearly all Europeans, Americans, and Australians are familiar from childhood. Theoretically this is a complication, in practice a simplification. The principle of "one sound, one letter" was broken on yet another point, but for anyone who had learnt a simple rule, there could never be any doubt about the pronunciation when he saw a word spelled out. The fact that conversely anyone who heard the word might be unsure of its spelling, i.e. whether he should write disiple, diciple, or disciple, could not weigh heavily, for by choosing the simplest form, disiple he would still be in accord with the original phonetic form of Novial – which also perhaps, in a remote future, will become the only ultimate language, when the world is sensible enough to reform the orthographies of the main languages radically. I know that this orthographic form has displeased several of Novial's old and faithtul friends, but it is my impression that many others have applauded it. And I have no doubt that if I had presented the language in this guise right from the beginning in An International Language and in the dictionary, the number of Novialists would now be considerably greater than it is. »
A Linguist's Life, pp. 227-228, Odense University Press 1995.