Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)

On Thursday 30 January 2003 3:56 pm, Sarah Marie Parker-Allen wrote:
> 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.
Why couldn't you have two spelling systems?  A Maggellic one, and a
non-maggellic one, with the Magellic one steadily being phased out?  It seems
natural that the younger generation would prefer the Non-Magellic one, and
eventually it would be brought into use.  My main reason for changing the
orthogrpahy, though, would be to make it easier to learn for foreigners, not
children.  Children do well on their own.

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