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dI have to agree with you MineralMan.

When I was a child I used to think that it would make so much more sense to spell everything phonetically using the symbols that one will find in all dictionaries. I also thought that it was rather absurd that the abbreviation for pounds is lbs. and not something more simple such as pds. And why on earth was penny abbreviated as d. Later on, having understood both the historical artifacts enclosed in our spelling, abbreviations and just the pure depth of languages and not solely English I changed my view entirely. One might think that to spell through, brought, night and Knight just to name a few is rather absurd but then once again one would lose an understanding of the historic Anglo-Saxon roots of such words. Jeez, I didn't thoughly understand English grammar until I learned German.

One may look at the French language which has similar vowels, diphthongs, dropped endings and unaspirated vowels making up the same sounds as hardly logical at all, but when its history and structure is thoroughly understood the logic of its spelling is readily apparent.

One might look at the Japanese language and how it's written and come to a conclusion of how absurd it is; given it's the most difficult language in the world to write. A language which uses two different syllabaries and Chinese ideograms how ridiculous can such a language be.? But if one studies the language in depth it also reveals not only its history but its but the utility in how it's written. Chinese ideograms: difficult to learn but representative of a single concept rather than a phonetic one. Writing them also requires less effort than single phonetic representations of a word. Also specifically in Japanese each ideogram, almost always has two different pronunciations; one representing the native Japanese pronunciation and the other representing the Chinese. This may seem also absurd, but if one sees how they are employed it makes a lot of sense. I won't go into any details but it allows them to form a plethora of compound words similar to how we do in English, but in our case we use Greek and Latin.

When I looked thru some of the content in the original thread it seemed I was struck by one thing which I found absurd in his original posting and that's the argument that language isn't a "social construct". That may be true if understood from a rigid deconstructionist perspective, but language without question is a cultural ,technological as well as historical construct.

"When I looked thru some of the content in the original thread it seemed I was struck by one thing which I found absurd in his original posting and that's the argument that language isn't a "social construct". That may be true if understood from a rigid deconstructionist perspective, but language without question is a cultural ,technological as well as historical construct."

Indeed. When one examines, say, the works of Chaucer, it is remarkable how different the English language was, even that short a time ago. Chaucer's orthography seems bizarre to us today, and without some training, it's almost impossible to understand his writing. Further, if you look at the documents at the founding of the USA, just over 200 years ago, spelling was a fungible thing, even then.

We spell according to a combination of the rules of the language, as set out by the prescriptive dictionary publishers and tradition. Spellings do change, of course, and quite naturally. In the USA, we have dropped the "our" spelling in words like colour, while those spellings are still used in Great Britain.

Our spelling will continue to change, through usage. An excellent example can be found in the extreme changes in spelling used by those using text messaging on PDAs and Cell phones. This abbreviated spelling is fascinating, and actually may become part of our written language in time.

Right now, the arbiters of orthography in this country are the publishers of books, magazines, and newspapers. They set and maintain the standards of American English orthography and punctuation. And so they shall continue to do.

There are at least a dozen proposed "new" or "rational" orthographies for English. Beginning with Noah Webster, a number of attempts have been made to "modernize" our orthography. All have failed miserably. The musings of a dilletante will not change our orthography.

However, anyone may spell as they choose, within the publications they produce. The web allows you to publish any writing you wish, spelled any way you wish. Whether anyone will read what you write is another issue, of course.

Coeur de Lion: "When I looked thru some of the content in the original thread it seemed I was struck by one thing which I found absurd in his original posting and that's the argument that language isn't a "social construct". That may be true if understood from a rigid deconstructionist perspective, but language without question is a cultural ,technological as well as historical construct."

Mr. Stolyarov: The role of linguistic innovators is most often occupied by a handful of great and multifaceted individuals who defy the prevalent cultural paradigm. Just as Galileo, Newton, and Darwin stand out as titans of the natural sciences and almost sole developers of ground-breaking theories, so do Shakespeare, Franklin, and Webster represent perhaps a more significant contribution to the English language than the remainder of its speakers combined.

Language is not a "social construct," but an individual creation, like scientific theories and filosofies. It is refined over time by successive individuals, without whose innovative effort it tends to merely lapse into a standstill that is not questioned by the general culture. Remember that, according to Rand, no collective mind can exist, just as no collective stomach can exist. All ideas and workable concepts of language were the products of consistent systematization performed by a single person at some point and time. The rest is just arbitrary hash that people use because others use it because still others in the past had absorbed it from even more distant forgotten others. That is the behavior of the second-hander (or should I say the fortieth-hander, since so many generations of this sponge-like behavior had passed)?