You may have noticed, Sellam, that the Germans recently performed vast
truncation surgery on their language, though I don't know much of the
details.
American English could benefit by removing many of those features that
puzzle foreigners and natives alike, such as the features that allow one to
presume that GHOTI is pronounced like FISH. That's GH as in enough, O as in
women, and TI as in nation.
If we could simply agree to spell through thru, as it's often done already,
and tough as tuff, etc, it would be an improvement. Of course, there are
still lots of possible syntax errors, e.g. there vs. their vs they're.
I couldn't find it when I was looking for it, but I saw one net-funny that I
received once, illustrating how that would resurrect the roots our language
shares with German.
If we could come up with an acceptable set of spellings and grammar that
would meet everyone's needs, perhaps we could reduce the need for
spell-checking our speech.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sellam Ismail" <foo_at_siconic.com>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 1:15 PM
Subject: More off-topic drivel: Re: Language and English
> On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Hans Franke wrote:
>
> > Thank you very much. So it seems there is a 'school' forcing this in
> > the US .... and I always wondered why some people add two spaces after
> > a period. There's even a very old 'text beautifier' for DOS which
> > inserted this (for my eyes) stupid spaces. Well, I guess CC is no
> > only the hardwarae :=)
>
> This actually serves a functional purpose, Herr Franke. It helps the eye
> as one reads to delineate sentences.
>
> I would suspect you silly Germans would subscribe to such precisionry, but
> I guess that bent for efficiency makes you want to save on the extra
> keystroke ;)
>
> Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer
Festival
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
> International Man of Intrigue and Danger
http://www.vintage.org
>
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>
Received on Fri Jan 04 2002 - 15:57:15 GMT