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Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

From:Matt Pearson <mpearson@...>
Date:Tuesday, October 13, 1998, 8:29
>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. ------------------------------------ Matt Pearson mpearson@ucla.edu UCLA Linguistics Department 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 ------------------------------------