Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

>Leo J. Moser wrote:
>> Let's split English into two imaginary (theoretical) languages.
>> They are different only in one spells a word "through," the other
>> spells it "thru."  Is not the latter going to be slightly "better" i.e.,
>> more efficient and more logical?
More efficient?  Perhaps.  After all, "thru" has 3 fewer letters than
"through" and takes a fraction of a second less time to type.  More logical?
Absolutely not!  There are, as far as I know, almost no words in English
which use "u" by itself to spell the /u/ phoneme, and even fewer words
which use "u" to spell /u/ at the end of a word.  So "thru" is just as
much an exception to the 'rules' as "through" is.  If you really wanted
to respell "through" in a way which conforms to the general norms of
English orthography, you'd probably have to spell it "throo" or "thrue".

Hair-splittingly yours...  ;-)

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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