At 1:27:03 PM on Thursday, December 6, 2007, fournet.arnaud
wrote:
> Modern languages like English or French have traditions :
> that is to say a lot of useless letters inherited from
> previous languages or previous habits about how to write
> previous languages. Hence de-b-t, et caetera....
Actually, the <b> in English <debt> is not historical: the
word is a borrowing of OFr <det(t)e> and is typically found
in ME as <det> and <dette>. In the 13th-16th centuries
French <dette> was sometimes artificially spelled <debte> by
etymologizing scribes; the English began to imitate this in
the 15th century, and it became the normal usage in the 16th
century.
I'm not sure what your point is with <et caetera>: nowadays
it's usually <etcetera>, which is a perfectly reasonable
English spelling of the word.
In any case it isn't only modern languages that have or make
use of orthographic traditions. Late Ogam Irish spelling
was orthographically conservative. Early British
inscriptions in Roman letters used Roman sound values as
much as possible. When a writing system is borrowed, its
conventions are likely to be borrowed with it.
Brian