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Re: English notation

From:John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Date:Friday, June 29, 2001, 19:58
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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Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>