Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)

Erm, it doesn't cost everyone a few years.  I was tested at age 22months
with a third grade reading level.  Yeah, okay, so my mom didn't have a full
time job during that period (she taught music, helped out at my dad's store,
and taught me to read and do math and stuff), but still.  It isn't like
there's a hard "oh, you can't possibly figure this out until you're 3 (4, 5,
6, 7) years old" rule.  Anyway, we can't all have alphabets as perfect as
the Mongolians (or whoever it is that has the most phonetic alphabet), and
some sacrifices have to be made unless we only want to have 26 sounds.

I, BTW, don't mind the way we do things in English.  Once you get used to a
system and are comfortable with it, it doesn't matter all that much, in
terms of what kind of eccentricities it has, because you're used to them and
are comfortable with them.  The Dvorak keyboard is supposedly many times
more efficient than Qwerty, but that doesn't prevent me from typing 90-some
words per minute, nor does it change the fact that if I switched, my typing
speed would go way back down.  Modifying the way we spell things isn't any
more of a solution to illiteracy than switching which side of the road
everyone drives on, is a solution to problems of speeding and people
violating traffic rules.  You have to memorize one system or another and
deal with its peculiarities no matter what, which means the burden of proof
that the new way is better, is *way* on the side that wants the change.  Not
to mention that the difficulties in implementing such a change are
incredible, especially with a population the size of the entire English
speaking world (esp. if you count all the ESL types who already know a first
language).  Just getting all the computers to accept new spelling rules
would be a nightmare -- remember Y2K?  All that involved was finding all the
instances of one very specific sort of data field and changing its
parameters slightly.  I don't want to think about rewriting UNIX, and
neither does anyone else.

Sarah Marie Parker-Allen
lloannna@surfside.net
http://www.geocities.com/lloannna.geo
http://lloannna.blogspot.com

"I will never buy an apple from peddlers plying their craft in remote places
where the customer base could not possibly support a full-time merchant." --
Rules for the Hero's True Love

> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of And Rosta
>
> IMO the primary argument in favour of spelling reform is to help
> children to learn to *read*. If children mix up saw/sore when they
> write, that's not such a problem. But it's important that they can
> see a word & work out on the basis of some adequately consistent
> rules how to pronounce it & hence recognize it. Current English
> orthography costs even bright children a couple of years of lost
> reading, and -- though I am guessing here -- quite possibly it
> costs some people a lifetime of illiteracy.
>
> --And.
---
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