Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)

kendra wrote:
> But, for instance, things like "whatever" and "word" would still be
> irregular, to people who live where I live; wh and w are only different if
> you're me and mess up sometimes.
RI is only regular in terms of READING.  If there's a rule that "w" and
"wh" are both pronounced /w/, that's perfectly regular in terms of
reading, tho not in terms of writing.  RI isn't intended to make WRITING
easier, just READING.  It regularizes English without sacrificing the
unity of written English the way a purely phonetic system would.

> I guess I wasn't very clear, my question really was "Does the increased
> efficiency of a not very much changed orthography outweigh the overall
> effort and cost involved in fixing it?"
But the thing is RI *doesn't* involve much effort and cost because you
don't have to change anything except to make new dictionaries and modify
education.  All books in old spelling could be kept without problem.
Children who grew up with new spelling would find the old spelling not
too terribly difficult, as we do with, for example, Shakespeare's
original spellings, as John Cowan pointed out earlier.

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