Re: English notation

Tom Tadfor Little wrote:


> Why? This baffles me. If one is going for recognizability/readability
> (which was my point to begin with), then it seems a good strategy to pursue
> would be to preserve traditional orthography wherever it is reflected in
> the speech of some substantial group, and depart from it only when no one
> (or hardly anyone) pronounces the word as suggested by the traditional
> spelling.

This is in essence the philosophy of Regularized Inglish: search the
archives for that phrase for my previous postings on it.  The principle
of RI is, for each letter/digraph/trigraph/tetragraph
representing a given range of pronunciations, to choose a few
common ones (ideally one) to retain, and change all the words that have
different pronunciations.  Thus "ea" only as in "heal"; "bread" becomes
"bred", and "great" becomes "grait".  It makes reading easy, though
writing is only somewhat easier than at present: you still have to
remember "strait" vs. "straight".  After all, we do far more reading
than writing.

--
There is / one art             || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
no more / no less              || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things             || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness           \\ -- Piet Hein

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