Re: English is a crazy language

That was a brave post Wiz, my post on "the schizophrenia of English" lead to
a flamefest and I ended up leaving the list for a few months out of
embarrasment.

This has been discussed on a list a LOT on both conlang and auxlang, English
spelling reform. I promote limited reform much like Irish Gaelic reformed
their language by eliminating silent letters. A futuristic vision of English
I have is where "lite" become standard instead of "light", just as "draft"
(as in beer) is used in the US instead of "draught". And "hiccough" is now
spelled "hiccup".

Other first-stage reformed words, most of these involving removed silent
"gh": fite, laff, ot or aut (ought), eit (eight), coff, troff, caut
(caught), alright (currently non-standard for "all right"), furlow,
enditement (endictment), ruff.

Now on to your list of sentences: we may have no hope yet for words spelled
the same but pronounced different. English is not alone in this: Japanese
has a lot of words that are spelled with different Chinese characters but
pronounced the same (using Sino-Japanese pronunciations), which is backwards
from English but still a problem. Using native Japanese readings for
isolated characters helps with the ambiguities, but that creates a dual
vocabulary, and more words to memorize....

I'm thinking of some sort of diacritic like a macron over one word to
distinguish it from the other homograph. I was taught phonics in first grade
by using numbers over letters and letter groups, so that the first "wound"
was "wou^1nd" and the second "wou^3nd".

> 2) The farm was used to produce produce.
> 3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
> 7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to
> present the present.
> 9) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
> 10) I did not object to the object.
> 11) The insurance for the invalid was invalid.
> 20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
> 21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
In those cases, there's a change of accent, so an acute accent over the
stressed vowel could help (they do that in Russian grammar books).

> 13) They were too close to the door to close it.
The first would could be spelled "closse", analogous to German's use of the
letter ß (or ss).

> 16) After a number of injections my jaw got number.
A hyphen in the second: numb-er?

> Let's face it - English is a crazy language... There is no egg in
> eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
> English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France.
> Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.
Ironically, French fries are called _pommes frites_ "fried apples" in
French. And the French horn is called _cor anglais_ "English horn" but our
English horn is a type of oboe!

Seriously, I would publish what you wrote, really.

~Danny~

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