Re: English spelling reform

Tristan wrote:
>>>(Now then, I have most claim to the abbrev. 'etc.' (my full version
>>>would be 'etcétra'), given that I normally have <c> for /s/...
>>>What're the rest of you doing? Tut, tut, tut!)
>>>
>>>
>>This is about English spelling, not Latin spelling :-)
>>
>>Spelt out, "et cetera" would be "àt sàtiri". But in other documents I
>>have followed the convention of translating acronyms only if they are
>>English-derived. So I'm being consistent.
>>
>Well... I'm saying that 'et cetera' is a single English word, not a
>Latin word... most people treat it thus... (it suffers, for example,
>from English sound changes (/@ri/ > /ri/) and an English rhotic). Why
>should our reader be forced to suddenly switch orthographies? A worse
>trade-off than having to remember than 'an' is spelt <än>.
I believe that |etc| is, for most readers of English, a single orthographic
unit that refers directly at the word/epression in question without invoking
any intermediate layer of orthographic/pronunciation rules - effectly an
alphabetic logogramme (or Latin Kanji, if you prefer!).

                                                     Andreas

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