Heill Keth,

> That is one of the differences between Icelandic and the modern
> Scandinavian languages, that the spelling of MS much more closely
> reflects the actual pronouncuiation, than in MI. MI is similar to
> English in this way.

I find this rather exaggerated; would you care to reason for your
statement?

The problem with English orthography is rather the irregularity in
its representation; rhymes in the spoken language cannot be spotted
graphically, by comparing spelling. In MI, and most MS, there is much
less irregularity, but rather a few "unorthodox correspondences",
which may be what you're criticizing MI for. That is, the sounds
attributed to a symbol may seem unconventional to users of other
orthographies: the Swedish and MI values of orthographic "u" may seem
strange to many others; the Danish value of "r" may seem wrong to
some; the Swedish and Norwegian values of "kj" (and sometimes "k", as
in Swedish "köp") may seem strange too; to English and Romance-
speakers, the general Nordic value of "j" may not seem right. And so
on. But that is hardly a fault of the orthographies. We take the
symbols and apply them to the language's phonemes in a consistent
manner, trying to make them correspond in a "traditional" manner, to
make the orthography less confusing for foreigners; usually the
orthographies have assigned the symbols by their historical value,
which acts to keep the related languages closer to each other,
graphically.

The fact is, it is the norm for orthographies to misrepresent the
spoken language. Speech develops faster than orthography, because it
is simply not practical to change the orthography as often as would
be required, to keep it up to date with speech. There is also more
information in the spoken language than most orthographies care to
represent, such as intonation.

> In fact, English does not seem to have gone
> through a serious spelling reform since the time of Shakespeare,
> or perhaps even earlier. And yet, in the intervening centuries
> there must have been many changes in pronounciation.
> Thus Written English is today a walking library of language history!
> (which is nice if you appreciate knowing about the history of a
> language)

English hasn't undergone any major spelling change, ever, except
perhaps that of the Normans, which can hardly be called a "reform".
But English spelling doesn't always reflect language history; rather,
we might say it reflects spelling history, and not much more than
that; nobody should rely on English spelling as etymological proof.

Perhaps I should give some examples:

* "Island" is an example of a spelling with false etymology: the "s"
was inserted in the false belief that the word were related to
Latin "insula" (island), while the word is actually just Germanic,
and thus related to ON "eyland". It was common for false etymologies
to develop by misconception of English as a Romance language.

* "Ptarmigan" has a falsely added "p" in front of it, which is also
not present in speech. Etymologists often sought to make the words
look more Greek, as well as Latin; for instance, they
respelled "rime" to "rhyme", which is probably false etymology too
(ON has "rím", but it's not necessarily of Germanic origin).

* "Admiral" is an example of a word that has changed its
pronunciation in accordance with a false spelling; originally, the
word was something like "amyrel", and thought to have originated from
Arabic (through Spanish, if I remember right) "El Emir" (the Emir).
Medieval etymologists, however, believed the word to have a Latin
origin, and respelled it to "admiral", by analogy with the
word "admire" (Lat. "admirare"). Subsequently, as this is not a
common word, people came to pronounce it by the new spelling.


Óskar