According to the item given in the last Qalam posting, somebody else has
noticed that the English spelling system and the English pronunciation
system are two different systems. Amazing! I'm shocked!! Shocked!!! The
English spelling system is, indeed, an accumulation of historical
accidents. But we knew that.
Just two points to remember when dealing with such people:
1. If we officially revised the spelling of English every few decades,
as I have been told the users of Netherlandish do, then it would be no
problem. Everyone would use a few spellings characteristic of how old
they are because those would indicate what their generation was taught
in school (just as I use a few slang terms such as "nifty" that indicate
how many decades it has been since I was in high school), and everyone
would expect to recognize and accept all the spellings of all the living
generations, and we would survive very comfortably. But English spelling
has been pretty well fixed for so long that we can't do that.
2. Even if there were an authority that could legislate the spellings to
be taught in English-speaking schools, and if anyone wanted to change
those spellings, the problem would be to choose the spoken dialect of
English that the revised spelling should be based on. We all know that.
We don't need to be given examples. I'll just mention that my favorite
when somebody tells me it's my duty to revise the spelling of English is
to ask them how I should spell the three-letter word that means a
canine. That's because my idiolect, coming originally from northeast
Kansas, has no open-o phoneme, and if I were dictating the spelling of
English I would have to insist that everyone spell it DAG. However,
everybody will have their own personal favorite example of something
similar.
So we are once again reminded what we face out there in the unthinking
world, especially one that has newspaper writers desperate for subjects
to write about.