From: eric@sejnet.sunet.se (Eric Thomas, SUNET)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
Subject: Re: Swedish Prime minister says Sweden gaining democratic freedom
Date: 14 Apr 92 13:04:29 GMT
Reply-To: eric@sejnet.sunet.se
Organization: Swedish University Network (SUNET), Stockholm, Sweden
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.3-5

In article <1992Apr10.154337.10929@husc3.harvard.edu>, donaghey@husc8.harvard.edu (Thomas Donaghey) writes...
>If it is fair to state that the bulk of those familiar enough with mainframes
>to use rn regularly are in or from fields in which problem sets and program-
>writings are more prevalent than papers, and if Harvard is representative of
>the rest of the nation (and it might be), then we have an explanation for our
>bad English, at least of a sort.
> 
>Besides, where's the spellchecker in rn?

Well, maybe I'm just too old-fashioned, but these arguments just don't cut it
for me. I don't consider it normal to need a spell checker (and they let a lot
of mistakes through, especially in latin languages) to write, say, one page in
your everyday native language (not a scientific article with technical terms
you may not use often). And I certainly don't think you ought to be a
literature major to know how to spell. I would agree that a professional
writer, who has to type pages and pages of text every day, should use a spell
checker to help catching typos and other errors, but if the only way he can
spell properly is with a computer, he's got a serious problem.

>In addition, of course, spelling in English is by no means easy; there are
>at least as many exceptions to each rule as there are rules themselves, and
>since words come into English from every conceiveable language, spelling de-
>pends on individual memorization as much as anything else.

True, but then so what? It is true of most languages, and often with the added
complication of grammatical rules and gender-tags. Compare: "I ate an apple - I
ate it" with "I ate-m an apple - I it ate-f" (the verb is not affected by the
gender of 'apple' in the first case because the apple is after the verb, and
vice versa; half of the verbs are like that, the other half use another rule,
depending on the auxiliary verb they use for the past, and you have to learn
which are which by heart). In addition, your everyday usenet article in English
uses a much smaller amount of words than the same article translated to about
anything else. English uses post-positions (whose spelling is very easy)
extensively, when most other languages use a new verb. Anyone can spell "put
on, put out, put up, put down, put off", but speakers of other languages have
to learn the spelling of (hmm, trying to find equivalent English verbs) "don,
extinguish, tolerate, deposit, adjourn". The rules for double consonants in
English are pretty simple, with the exception of a few imported words like
personnel. Compare: "to call, I/you/we/they call, he calls" with "appeler,
j'appelle, tu appelles, il appelle, nous appelons, vous appelez, ils appellent"
(I don't even remember what rules covers this). Then you have accents, which
don't even exist in English, and which can vary with the tense: alle'ger,
j'alle`ge, nous alle'geons. Well I could go on forever, but I just won't accept
any claims that this spelling problem is due to English being difficult to
spell. It is one of the easiest I know in this respect (I think Swedish is even
easier, though, once you get to remember the genders).

  Eric