Re: Yûomaewec: English Spelling

Christophe Grandsire wrote, en réponse à myself:

> > Nah, this project had its birth some time ago, long before I'd heard
> > of Maggel, probably long before Maggel existed.
>
> Depends, the first instance of Maggel was created when I was 16, thus 10
> years ago. Of course, at that time nobody heard about it, since it was
> the time I was still secret about my hobby and didn't have a computer or
> Internet :)) .
OK, no, but the English spelling thing has been in production for what
certainly feels like more than a year - I could get a more accurate
date by searching the Conlang archives (for an early edition) but I
can't be bothered :-)

> :)) Funny: a spelling reform that doesn't aim at absolute regularity ;)) .
> The very strangeness of such an idea (and the fact that you introduce
> accents to write English ;)) ) makes it very attractive for me ;)) .
Most reforms (and IALs for that matter) are terribly bland, IMO. I
know the reasons, but it doesn't exactly help me feel motivated
about them.

I have a magazine article at home (from an old issue of a computer
magazine) which contains the story of an American university campus
where the students had made tracks in the dust for a while, and then
the paths were built over the tracks. I suggest that university could
teach most spelling reformers a thing or two. :-)

Most reform efforts I've seen do use diacritics (the example on one of
Zompist's /Rant/ pages is not atypical). I do think English speakers
(myself included) would find it hard to get used to diacritics (my
handwriting's bad enough already without that extra element to worry
about) which is one reason why my system contains the rule that
diacritics are omitted from diphthongs. The other reason, of course,
is that it avoids some of the arguments between, say, dialects with
[eI] and dialects with [{I].

Adrian.

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