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Thursday, July 06, 2006

Spelling?

Push for simpler spelling persists - Yahoo! News

The simpler spelling idea doesn't sound too bad on the surface. We would make the english language more like spanish, in that any word that you hear you can spell. One problem is that we would need more letters in the alphabet, or use two letter groups for certain sounds. Another problem is that everyone that is not in kindergarden would need to relearn the alphabet, and how to spell most words. The article brought up a good point, that we get meaning from how words are spelled. Sometimes we get more information from how the word is spelled than from how it is sounded out. It would most likely take over a generation. Books would have to be reprinted. Keywords in ANSI C would get redefined.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Can't say whether this is good or bad. I don't particularly like the idea retroactively setting the spelling of things the way they currently sound. I'm more a fan of making all of our letters make the same sound in all situations like in the romantic languages do. Then redifining spellings using those. You're right we'd have to have many more letters in the alphabet, they said there were 40 sounds.