Re: OT: Re: Why do people in the UK put a u in the word color?
On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 09:32:48PM +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Apr 2006 13:07:25 -0500
> Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 12:48 -0500, Kent West wrote:
> > > Ron Johnson wrote:
> > > > We should have gone all the way to simplified spelling.
> > >
> > > Surely you've seen that internet "joke" about simplified spelling, where
> > > the silent e gets dropped, and y's that sound like an i get replaced by
> > > an i, and the k sound of c is replaced by k, etc? Soon, the sample
> > > paragraph is pretty much unintelligible. Somewhat amusing. Sorry I don't
> > > have a link.
>
> I found three versions. Here is my favorite:
>
> http://www.speedybar.ch/witze/jokes2000/spelling.html
>
>
> > It's unintelligible because of the way we've been trained.
> >
> > Seriously, though, some way to distinguish between long and short
> > vowels still must be used, so that joke paragraph (which I also
> > remember seeing) is a /reducto ad absurdum/.
>
> I agree. And the resulting text is not so unintelligible if you are
> used to phonetic spelling.
The Dutch language has gone through spelling reform. But even so, not
all letters have single sounds, and not all sounds have single
spellings. What I have noticed, though, is that every case I've seen
in which one sound appears to have several spellings, there is some
local dialect of Dutch somewhere that pronounces the two spellings
differently.
So the persence of local variations in pronunciation is a barrier to
further regularization of spelling.
I'm sure the same would be true of English, although I suspect the
situation could be much better than it is now.
-- hendrik
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