Steve Bett wrote:

>
> I just received a review copy of Adam Brown's new book, Sounds, Symbols and Spellings. (McGraw-Hill, 2005) Here is a statement from the back cover:
>
> The English spelling system is based on the alphabetic principle, that letters in the spelling system represent individual consonant and vowel sounds in the pronunciation. However, for various reasons, many of them related to the history of the language, the English spelling system is perhaps the worst example of an alphabetical system in existance.
>
> SB: Is there general agreement on this statement by linguist Adam Brown? I would like to hear your views.

Who is Adam Brown, and why do you identify him as "linguist"?

Is the blurb-writer acquainted with French? Korean? (Which, by the
measure that people criticize English for, is even more disconnected
from surface phonetics than English.)

For whom are you reviewing it?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...