--- In norse_course@..., Angasule <angasule@...> wrote:

Heill Angasule,

(or "heil"? Real name?)

> I'm from Argentina, and we are often told by other Spanish speaking
> countries that we speak 'bad' Spanish... of course, we could say the
> same about Spain's Spanish, our dialects have the same quantity of
> speakers (around 35 millions) after all! The idea of a Dictionary
> *telling* one how to write a word instead of *describing*
(according to
> what's normal at the time) is what's I believe is called
restrictivism

Actually, "prescriptivism" :)

> (the other 'side' being called something like 'descriptivism', I
guess, haven't read anything on that in over a year).

Very right. You've made good points here :)

> > An
> > interesting side note to this is the reason there was
> > a move to change the spelling in the first place was
> > that with the pronuniciation of English depending on
> > the word and not the letter it is quite possible to
> > write the word "fish" as "ghoti". The "gh" as in
> > "rough". The "ti" as in "nation" and I can't remember
> > where the "o" comes from. But it works.

> That is, of course, completely bogus :) 'gh' has the [f] value in
some
> words (like 'rough', I believe), but never, AFAIK, at the beginning
of a
> word (think of 'ghost', 'ghoul'... no more examples come to my mind
now,
> too much CRPG'ing!), 'ti' is [S] in a few places only, too (I can't
> think of other place than the ending -tion, btw, maybe it's a latin
> ending originally?). About that 'o', I guess that it depends on how
you
> were saying the 'i' to start with (btw, I guess you could change
that to
> 'ghtti', I've heard 'ballet' said with a final 'i' :) )!

This is an excellent point regarding the "ghoti" deal; I didn't want
to argue about English spelling, so I left it unsaid.

-tion, btw, is a Latin ending. The 'o' is from 'women', as Birgit
pointed out. Shaw's use of 'ti' as [S] is completely "bogus", since
it never gets pronounced that way outside of the -tion environment.

Óskar