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Language revival (was Re: Which auxlangs? (was Re: Iwon't[to]start a flame war))

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Sunday, November 28, 1999, 20:05
John Cowan wrote:
> True in case of radical ("by the roots", etymologically) spelling change; > not true of a modest reform.
But what would be the point of a modest reform? It would be hard to come up with a spelling change that regularizes English without making it illegible to Old Orthography Users. And, think about this: many people find archaic spellings very difficult, even when they're only slight differences like interchaning "v" and "u" or "y" and "i" and "j". Even a modest change would probably still put older writing in a definitely archaic category, especially since, I suspect, it would be easier to read the New Ortography if you knew the Old than the other way around (due to the large number of irregularities in the Old). Imagine the poor child who only learned "thru" encountering "through", or who knew "tuf" encountering "tough" -- "Old linguists never die - they just come to voiceless stops." - anonymous http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTailor