[The_Reader_David]

Cool. But I hope her intellectual preciousness eventually comes to something more substantial than facility with navigating the irrationality of English orthography.

The fact we English speakers have to spend any brain-power on spelling is the unfortunate result of having frozen our spelling too early. I would be perfectly easy to have completely rational spelling for English the way Russian and Korean have scripts which exactly encode the pronunciation, but no! We had to follow Samuel Johnson and pin down our spelling with remnants of the history of languages and irrationalities like the decision to transliterate the Greek phi as ph, rather than f, frozen in. In the days of Shakespeare and the King James translators there was not a fixed system for spelling English, and they managed to produce the finest prose (and blank verse) the language has ever produced. (Did not fretting about spelling help?)

[golux]

Cool. But I hope her intellectual preciousness eventually comes to something more substantial than facility with navigating the irrationality of English orthography.


S-E-E-M-Z T-A M-E D-A-T Y-O-U B-E H-A-T-I-N


C-U-Z Y-O-U B-E J-E-A-L-U-Z

[BfloGuy]

The fact we English speakers have to spend any brain-power on spelling is the unfortunate result of having frozen our spelling too early.

Yes, it is complex -- but it's eminently teachable. We have 44 sounds that we have to stuff into 26 letters. It's tough, but the result is the most flexible and most widely-used language on Earth.

And, trust me, the French and the vaunted, "perfectly-phonetic" Spanish-speakers misspell their languages all the time. It's all about the education.