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To: burzum
Ha ha. You respond with an extreme.

I should have put a smiley in there. :-)

I understand the problems with english for non-natives. Personally, I don't have much problems with it myself. If you are really a stickler about spelling, most of the time, if you run into a word you can't spell, there are normally at least 3 other ways to say the same thing that you can.

If "we" decide to 'reform' spelling, it will inevitably lead to a 'reform' of grammar as well. I mean, if you really want to get a non-native speaker riled up about english as a language, start a discussion of tenses! If they start revising grammar, they are likely to get rid of zeugmas entirely, as it is a pretty obscure part of speech to begin with. That would suck.

Maybe it's just the old conservative in me, but I can live with things as they are.

117 posted on 06/01/2007 6:50:00 AM PDT by zeugma (MS Vista has detected your mouse has moved, Cancel or Allow?)
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To: zeugma
If "we" decide to 'reform' spelling, it will inevitably lead to a 'reform' of grammar as well. I mean, if you really want to get a non-native speaker riled up about english as a language, start a discussion of tenses! If they start revising grammar, they are likely to get rid of zeugmas entirely, as it is a pretty obscure part of speech to begin with. That would suck.

When the Spanish language had a spelling reform, they didn't reform the grammar. To do that would make the way the language is used more different from how it is written. The goal of spelling reform is to make it less different. Just look up Spanish verbs like ir, saber, ser, etc. to see that they didn't fix the irregularities in conjugation. But all of the conjugations are written exactly the way they sound.

Anyways, I'm not too frightened by English conjugation issues. There are a lot of irregularities, but there are very few different types of conjugations compared to most languages. In particular, the English language almost doesn't have to deal at all with subjunctive clauses.

146 posted on 06/01/2007 10:56:28 AM PDT by burzum (None shall see me, though my battlecry may give me away -Minsc)
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