HAil Oskar,

you wrote:

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

The problem with English is that the pronounciation of a letter
depends on what word it is occurring in. Thus, in English, the
pronounciation of each word has to be learned independently
of the spelling of the same word.

I recall some years ago an American spelling reform, that
did not come across as very major, was being discussed. An
example is the spelling of "night" as "nite".

(I think this spelling reform was abandoned later, because it is
really very long ago since I saw any one write night as "nite")

The "gh" in "night" is actually a good example, since it suggests
that the word "night" was previously pronounced differently, though
this is many centuries ago. If you compare with West-Germanic,
e.g. Dutch "nacht" you will get some idea about what the "gh" is
doing in English "night". There are many such examples, and
you will notice many as you work with the language, with an open eye
for such phenomena.

The medieval spelling of imported arabic words, (you mentioned admiral)
is of course common to all European languages, and thus does not give a good
demonstration of the peculiarities of English.

One thing one motices is that the dictionaries they use in America
(e.g. Webster's) all include phonetic pronounciation guides for each
separate word, as well as etymologies.

The reason for the phonetic information is of course that there
is no other way to find out how to pronounce a word. (except by asking
someone else, who is a seasoned user) The reason for all the etymologies,
is because almost 50% af all English words are actually French imports.
And the meanings of many English words are very hard to learn without
knowing some Latin or some French.

For comparison, I'd like to state that the dictionaries we used for Norwegian
in school, did not include any etymologies at all. Nor did they include any
phonetic pronounciation guidelines. That is because Norwegian is very much
pronounced "as is".

(and I don't think the Norwegian language is in a unique position
in this regard, either - but that is another discussion)

Here a simple example of how the constant spelling reforms work:

Formerly it was "jeg stod".
However, since the "d" is no longer pronounced, the new spelling
rules say that the correct form is now "Jeg sto".

Very simple: you just keep changing the spelling so that it always
conforms to the latest habits of pronounciation.

I could give many other examples. But since a few random examples
are hardly statistically significant, the final judgement of the
state of affairs must be left to those who know the two languages
that are being compared. Preferably it should be people who have
lived a considerable time "among the populace" of the countries
that are being compared. Or better: gone through primary school
in the given countries. Since I haven't lived in Iceland, I just
have to take your word for it, that the Icelandic system is a
consistent one. But if the Icelandic school childeren all need
to know SAMPA and IPA in order to learn to pronounce their own
language, then that would of course modify ones view on how close
written Icelandic is to an approximately phonetic spelling system.

Note that my remarks were descriptive.
I wasn't "criticizing" either English or Icelandic.
I think it is nice that some languages are conservative and stick
to old forms.

Keth