Posted on 06/04/2010 8:50:41 PM PDT by James C. Bennett
The Scripps National Spelling Bee highlights what a mess the English spelling is – a hodgepodge of orthographies borrowed from German, French, Greek, and Latin. Is it time for a makeover?
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that the word "fish" could legitimately be spelled "ghoti," by using the "gh" sound from "enough," the "o" sound from "women," and the "ti" sound from "action."
Shaw was probably not the originator of this joke, but he was one of a long line of people who thought that the English language's anarchic spelling, a hodgepodge of Germanic, French, Greek, and Latin, was desperately in need of reform.
To this end, he willed a portion of his estate toward the development of a new phonetic script. The result was the Shavian alphabet, whose 47 letters have a one-to-one phonetic correspondence with sounds in the English language. Like just about every other attempt to rein in English spelling, Shaw's alphabet continues to be widely ignored to this day.
But spelling-reform advocates press on. The Associated Press reported that this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee was picketed by four protesters, some dressed in bee costumes, who distributed buttons reading "Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."
The demonstrators were from the the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society, organizations that aim to do to English orthography what the metric system did for weights and measures. The American Literacy Council endorses SoundSpel, which seeks to "rationalize" the English language by spelling each of the English language's 42 (or so) phonemes one way and one way only. In SoundSpel, "business" becomes "bizness," "equation" becomes "ecwaezhun," "learned" becomes "lernd," "negotiate" becomes "negoesheaet," and so on.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Don't you want to put something more in this? Something seems missing in the red part below. (Unless someone's name is "had," and you have chosen to not use an upper case "h" in that name.)
Xena, where Tax-chick had had “has had,” had had “had had”; “had had” had had both the teacher’s and SAJ’s approval.
Take out the commas and everything between them. That should make sense.
“If that constitutes ‘progress’ to you, so be it. Hate to quote Cicero again, but, as he famously remarked to Catalina, ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catalina, patientia nostra?’”
1. I didn’t call it progress. I called it inevitable.
2. Never hate quoting Cicero.
3. What does “F u sa so” mean?
4. Take God seriously. Not men, mankind, or culture. They pass.
Commas, will, get, you, everytime.
Yes, as with cheap, pink wine, in a box, it’s easy to go overboard with commas.
2. OK.
3. "F u sa so" equals, in illiterate mode, "If you say so"
4. Quite reasonable.
I'm more and more convinced that this repugnant practice is more harmful than anyone thinks. It doesn't improve self-esteem, whatever that is, it fails to instill humility. Moreover, you can't serve children a sh1t sandwich and tell'em it's chocolate. So, what they learn is that adults are idiots. This leads to cockiness, smart mouths, and that pathetic sense that they know more than anyone else when in reality they are callow and ignorant.
Won’t argue with your assertions. It also makes them pretty dependent on steady positive feedback which, at least in my case, is pretty sparse in the adult world. That’s a recipe for mass depression in young adults.
It was a joke.
Yes I know. And it's an old joke, plagiarized from Mark Twain.
I don’t know the reference. What is it?
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