Aaron Sherber wrote:
At 10:05 PM 7/6/2004, Darcy James Argue wrote: >On 06 Jul, 2004, at 09:43 PM, Aaron Sherber wrote: > >> Just so I understand where you're coming from, are you really >> unwilling to call "uncooth" an incorrect spelling, here in the >> English-speaking world of the early twenty-first century? > >Yep.
That strikes me as relativism carried more than a shade too far. Is there anywhere you would draw this line? Is "qwerty" merely an unconventional spelling of "uncouth"?
Well, it would be if there were linguistic tradition of pronouncing q as "un", w as "k", er as "oo" and ty as "th." But since there is no way you could point to any of those letters in qwerty ever having those pronunciations, you would be hard pressed to defend your claim.
Since the letters oo are often pronounced with the same sound as the ou in uncouth, Aaron's position can be better defended than yours can. And in another hundred years, his spelling may be the correct one according to the dictionaries of the time.
ghoti = fish is a better example than your qwerty = uncouth claim. gh as in enough + o as in women + ti as in ignition = fish.
But I wouldn't expect my readers to have a single clue as to what I meant when I typed "the boy was cleaning the ghoti" because there are other pronunciation traditions which might make a person pronounce it as "goaty" whereas there aren't any pronunciation traditons which would make an english speaker pronounce uncooth as anything other than oncouth.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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