Re: English is a crazy language

Tristan scripsit:

> Abolish individual spelling rules and let spellers work it out for
> themeselves, I say.
Well, once upon a time that was the way it was.   Printers necessarily
had to have some conventions, so they made them up.  Lexicographers
wrote down what conventions printers decided on.  Then the printers
began to consult the dictionaries.  The result was a Hartree-Fock
process, which converged on the stable pair of English orthographies
we have today.  And that's how English got standardized without a normative
dictionary or academy.

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_