Re: Swedish alphabet [was: Re: Spanish alphabet]

Ed Heil wrote:

> So would you say that English is approaching a point where the written
> word has no relation to the phonetics of its pronunciation, and
> becomes an ideographic glyph, as in Chinese?
I would think that that's a rather pronounced exaggeration.  Although
the Chinese characters do have phonetic elements, these are AFAIK
based on the spoken Chinese during, like, the Han dynasty (ca. 220
BC to 280 AD) or something -- very different from today's spoken
language(s). English orthography is not only based primarily on a
much later date (generally accepted to be around 1485), the entire
system was highly phonemic when it became ossified into the state
it's now in, something you can't say about the Chinese characters even
when they were originally standardized.

>  English is supposed to
> have a number of odd resemblances to Chinese as it is.... Hmm....
Not particularly more than any of the other hundreds of isolating
languages around the globe.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

Denn wo Begriffe fehlen,
Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.
   -- Mephistopheles, in Goethe's _Faust_
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