Earl M. Herrick wrote:

>
> 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.

And we'd soon be cut off from all past literature. Shakespeare would
(and does) get reedited into modern spelling, but who else would?

> 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.

He was a UN Secretary-General, and that's indeed how he was pronounced
...

> 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.
>
> That's life.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...