🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 14 Feb 1997 08:31:50 GMT, Loren Petrich wrote:

>The atrocious character of English spelling is a function of history,
>and does not represent some Panglossian optimum. English spelling is so
>bad because it is a mixture of different spelling conventions
>(Anglo-Saxon and Norman) and a lot of frozen history (silent letters --
>some of them are a result of analogies, however). The result is a
>semi-ideographic system.

It also continues to have regional influences to this day. Take a
cockney Brit and a Texan, put them in a room together, and discover just
how little they can communicate, despite the fact that both allegedly speak a
language called English.

I won't even get into nonsense like "Ebonics".

>There are many languages that do a *much* better job at
>spelling-pronunciation mapping. Finnish is supposed to be one of the
>best. Why don't you study some other languages some time -- you'll see.

Finnish is an extremely brutal language for an English speaking person
to try and learn, believe me. In the 1960s, I lived in Port Arthur (now
Thunder Bay) in Canada, a city that has the largest Finnish expatriate
population in the world. Trying to learn that language, I damn near
choked to death a couple of times. Swedish and Danish aren't quite so
bad, but Icelandic and Finnish... urgh. Something about having 18 consecutive
vowels in a row always threw me for a loop :-)

However, from the contextual side of things, both Finnish and German
(and many Inuit languages, as well) are polysynthetic, something that
English isn't. Essentially, you can quite legitimately make up new words
on the fly using prefixes and suffixes, and everyone will understand the
new word, because the rules are quite strict. In English, that really
only applies to things like tense (ie. if a new verb like FTP appears,
"I FTPed the file from Dallas" will be understood by everyone).

>Mr. Edelman, I'm surprised that you aren't wishing that English was
>written in Chinese characters.

Gah! Pictograms! No no no no no no no no!

I have enough grief already keeping Hiragana and Katakana separate,
thanks.

>I think that what we are seeing with English spelling is psychological
>denial -- some people can't bear the thought that it could be improved
>on, so they deny that it can.

Of course, those of us who were taught "proper" (ie. Oxford) English
continue to consider many Americanisms as lowbrow bastardizations of
the language.... :-)

I still remember seeing a sign on a power station that was trilingual - English,
French, and American. It said "No Admission. Pas D'admission. Keep Out".

>Much as with M$ software.

>And on my list of numerals, why is it that we have some names for them
>and not others? Why "one, two, three", instead of "pam, lok, veh"? Why
>is English closest to German and Swedish, and somewhat less close to
>French or Spanish or Latin or Russian or Greek or Gaelic or Welsh or
>Hindi or Sanskrit, and resembling very little, if at all, Finnish or
>Hungarian or Turkish or Hebrew or Arabic or Tamil or Chinese or
>Japanese?

Largely, it has to do with whom England was busy invading (or being
invaded by) at the time that literacy with respect to numerals became
commonplace with the English people...

>That's what all those who celebrate M$'s market dominance are implying,
>that M$ is the best of all possible major software companies.

I don't know a lot of people who celebrate MS dominance, or the
dominance of any company in the marketplace. In the past, it was IBM
running the show. Now it's MS. Ten years from now, it may be Netscape,
or Be, or someone altogether different. And then people will still have
the same arguments, a generation removed.
________________________________________________________________________
William de Haan   b...@deus.com    905-281-3523 Voice    905-281-3524 Fax
Deus Ex Machina Ltd., 3650 Kaneff Crescent, Mississauga, Ontario L5A 4A1
    No hablo espanol.    Non parlo Italiano.   eG'K Hy's Klingon.