And then quantum physics, brain surgery and then assembler. All three have given me trouble especially brain surgery. I propose that it be simplified so it could be performed with a can opener and a spoon.
Umm, well, perhaps someone is experimenting with that method, it sure would explain a lot....
Some of these exchanges are growing trivial and pointless, but there is one underlying, fundamental misunderstanding that may be worthwhile to clear up.
Many anti-reformers feel that English spelling is a great institution, an honest system purposely developed by our culture and now under attack by those who would corrupt it and dumb it down into something inferior and ignorant.
Reformers fundamentally disagree. The alphabet, and the system of writing that uses it, is a great institution and a brilliant invention. English spelling is a corruption of that system, a tragic mess that happened by accident and makes a mockery of the brilliance. Reformers want to correct that and return to the original rationality.
Foreigners whose own languages use the alphabet correctly, who know how it is supposed to work, are appalled when they see what we've done to it. Children who have successfully learned Cyrillic Russian, and German, and more, are disgusted and rebellious when they start to learn English and they gradually recognize what a horrible mess it is. One language teacher, trying to teach small French children English pronunciation from written words, realized what a monster he was being, since English spelling cheated, was corrupt, was Inconsistent, Vas INSANE! He wrote a poem about it , the Chaos, starting with :
"I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy..."
His point was that in an honest language uzy would rhyme with usy, and izzy would not. When they said that sentence, his students, naively believing English was honest, would say either "I will keep you, Soozy, boosy or ... Sizy, bisy. " And likewise hea-d does not rhyme with hea-t. At first the poem was funny, but as he went on and on with one inconsistency after another, and on and on and on , you could see he wasn't trying to be funny, he really hated it and could not stop. Here are the first three verses:
The Chaos
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind.
How well *should* the system work? A recent news article told of finding the earliest version of the alphabet scratched on some rocks in Egypt, dating from 1500 BC. It consisted only of consonants (because the vowels were predictable), just 15 or so letters. And, said the article, it could be learned in one afternoon!
How could that be possible? Well, because it was designed for one language only, each letter was a recognizable picture of an object starting with that sound. A few letters remain recognizable today -- -their word for water started with M (think Maritime) so M was a couple of waves. They had an S word for a snake or serpent, so S was drawn as a little snake. And likewise with all letters.
I did an experiment. I drew pictures for all our consonants, preserving M and S but making G a little Gun , B a V-winged Bird and so, and I found I could memorize that list in about 10 minutes. So the system could indeed be learned in half a day -- and probably in half an hour. They probably had some funny little song to help out with memorization, and maybe a scrap of bark with the symbols all scratched onto it, and they learned the idea behind it. Thereafter they could read and write! A skill previously known only to priests who had studied hieroglyphics for years. Can you imagine their joy? Gosh what a great idea!
Later the same letter shapes were adopted by people with other languages, so the correspondence of letter shape with a common object no longer worked. Still, it only took a few days to memorize the shapes and sounds, and you could learn to read in two weeks. (But don't believe me about that, ask a foreigner. Ask some Koreans, who are ever so proud of their alphabet, and rightly so. )
And the great invention spread rapidly until it covered the whole earth and every language except Chinese. It was so simple and so right that so long as you followed the rules you just couldn't lose.
Except in English, which broke the rules, which proceeded without plot or plan to incorporate spellings from languages with totally different rules, which enshrined spellings to reflect pronunciations a thousand years out date. Which allowed Flemish printers to add e's to the ends of words just to make the lines come out even. Which encouraged Johnson to pick the weirdest spellings of words precisely so it would be harder to learn, so reading wouldn't spread to commoners. With the result that, unbelievably, it takes us two years to learn. And what should be as easy and natural as learning to walk is so hard that most of us never master it. If the inventor could see it he'd be so disgusted he'd curse us with, with the Income Tax!
It is this brilliant heritage which we have fouled up and wrecked. Really truly FUBAR'ed. Our spelling is hated by everyone who knows how the system is supposed to work. They *despise* it. They recognize it is not a logical system, not really a system all, but more like a train wreck.
Reformers are not the ones who want to dumb down a noble system, they are the ones who are true to the wonderful idea of alphabetic writing. English spelling is the dumbed-down disaster, a monstrous vandalism of a great design. Reformed spelling is the effort to restore it and make it work right again. Through progress to lift it back to the level of 1500 BC.