Re: OT: English and schizophrenia

John Cowan wrote:
>Lu=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=EDs?= Henrique scripsit:
>
> > I am sure that English ortography was invented by the Devil in one of
>his
> > worst days, but language is language, ortography is ortography.
>
>If it had been created by anyone, it would surely have been by the Devil,
>but of course it evolved.
>
> > One other cause of ortographic chaos in English is its vowel system,
>with
> > the (for non-English native speakers) weird opposition between lax and
> > tense. AFAIK, none of the other widely spoken languages, or any other
> > European language makes this opposition.
>
>AFAIK all the Germanic languages do this.
Well, Swedish don't, and I don't think any of the other Nordic langs do
either. To compensate, we've of course got an atrocious number of
monophthongs, including [}:]. Norwegian also sports the diphthong [{}].

                                            Andreas

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