Re: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful)

Yeah, perhaps. Like I said, I speak English regularly so I'm probably
biassed. I'm probably aligning simplicity with writing closer to the
IPA/Latin etc. sounds for each letter within reason for the amount of
sounds. But to me, English still looks simpler... Maybe I'll take a
different argument altogether and argue that English writing is more
like kanji and therefore can't be called simpler or harder than French
because it's not ;)

Tristan

On Tue, 2002-04-30 at 06:36, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à Tristan <zsau@...>:
>
> >
> > From what I've seen of English and French spelling (a lot of English,
> > less so French), I'd have to say that English is simpler. It has more
> > irregularities, but it's simpler. Of course, that could be because I
> > speak and use English on a daily basis. But still, English would spell
> > _oiseau_ as 'wazo(w)' or read it as
> >
>
> The thing is that being simpler and having more irregularities is simply
> antinomic! |oiseau| may look strange, but it's perfectly regular (|oi| is
> *always* pronounced [wa], |s| is *always* pronounced [z] between vowels, and
> |eau| is *always* pronounced [o]) and the rules to read it are already acquired
> by children of 7, as well as *all* the rules to read French (really, only the
> first year is used to actually "learn" writing rules - at least in my time -.
> The other years are used to actually learn words for the other direction: to
> write, since in this case the fact that French has often different ways to
> write the same sound makes things a bit more complicated). But the whole thing
> is that French writing rules are far simpler than the rules Mark Rosenfelder
> had difficulties to put together, simple enough at least that we actually learn
> them.
>
> Christophe.
>
> http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
>
> Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.