Ralph Shumaker wrote:
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.
Old English died in 1066 with the Norman Conquest, which replaced a
Germanic language with a dialect of Old French as the official language
of the country (well, of the Norman-controlled portions of Britain,
which tended to vary with time). Over the next few centuries, Norman,
Saxon, Frisian and a bunch of other languages merged into what we call
Middle English, the language of Chaucer, where it became habitual to use
a Norman word alongside its Saxon equivalent so the meaning would be
clear to all. By the time of Shakespeare, the English language had
become so hungry for new words to describe the new world that was
developing that English speakers gobbled up words from the languages of
newly discovered and exploited countries to supplement those English had
inherited from French, Latin, Greek, German and Celtic. That's why
English has so many more words than other languages.
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.
But we use only 26 letters to approximate about 57 sounds. Other sounds,
such as tongue clicks and glottal clicks, don't get represented at all
or have "x" represent all of those various sounds.
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.
Today's English is still very much a language in flux, partly through
the technological jargons that develop being adopted, to some extent, in
the ordinary language. Plus popular writers keep inventing words like
'nerd' that get incorporated.
I like what Mark Twain said about someone being dim if he could not
find more than one way to spell a word.
--
James E. Henderson / WordJames / Am0 / Am Ouil
http://www.Am0.us
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
