James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
Ya want more?
When I was looking lightly into middle english and olde english, I found that the reason for our attrocious spelling in today's english came mostly as a result of the printing press. When typesetters from other language backgrounds came to try to print english, they had only the letters from their own language. So they used approximations to try to get close to the actual pronunciation in accordance with the limits of the sounds of *their* letters. The bottom line here (for me) is that they didn't let the customary spelling get in the way of trying to approximate the actual pronunciation with what they had available.
If only we, today, would be daring enough to let go of the customary spellings on at least a *few* of the most common words and just spell them more like they sound. I have chosen to do exactly that with words like tho and thru. These "mistakes", at least, are common enough that they don't act as speed bumps for the brain. I suppose "enuf" should be a candidate, as well as "altho" (among many others). But even if we can get enough people to do this, of course there's going to be differences of opinion as to which ones to do it with. And that's all right. The popular ones will catch on better than the unpopular. And I'm going to do my part.
Tho I do *not* hold to the idea of carte blanch replacing with "z" every part of every word that sounds like "z". I saw an article (I think by Mark Twain) with this kind of approach. He would introduce an obvious and simple change and procede to implement that change for the duration of the article. Each change was perfectly logical, tho each implementation made the resulting text progressively harder to read. I think this approach would create too much backlash and the result may end up worse than the start.
Spelling drift *has* occurred in english. But then it stagnated, not because it was good, but because people got used to it. I think it can change for the better if enough people start agreeing on better spellings for some of the words, and implementing them. "Tho" and "thru" may never catch on. But I think they should. I think the guy who made the claim that we should be speaking Olde English (the only english that is correct) made a very good point. Today's english is correct for today. But that doesn't mean that it has to be correct for tomorrow.
I like what Mark Twain said about someone being dim if he could not find more than one way to spell a word.
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