From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Date: 11 Apr 92 16:45:46 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <29E63A12.8419@noiro.acs.uci.edu> cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
>>In article <1992Apr3.202342.24493@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
>>>
>>>True, but it's misleading to refer to "designers of orthographies for
>>>English" _et al._  No one designed those orthographies.
>
>Jesus, you ain't kidding.  

Jesus may've been kidding, but Scott sure wasn't.  :-)

>>>Old English and Old French had reasonable orthographies.
>
>ANYTHING would be more reasonable than what we have.

How about assigning a computer-generated random sequence of characters
to each word?  :-)

>I shared an office with another grad from Argentina a
>while back, and she was floored when she heard of the concept of a
>"spelling bee."

So was I, I must confess.  My first exposure to English was more than
twenty years ago, and at that time I didn't even think of it as a real
language - it was more like a new kind of game.  So I really thought
that the bizarre spelling was there to make the game more challenging.
I'm not sure how aware I was of the fact that there were some people
who had English (spelling and all) for their native language.

>All this makes it too easy, so we HAD to have a
>screwed up system of writing it just to make the furriners go nuts
>learning it.

I thought you had to have it just to please this furriner here, who
considers it one of the great joys in his life to watch the natives go
nuts struggling with the orthography of their own language.  <fiendish grin>

>The quirks are kind of neat, but they get a little irritating,
>especially once you learn something like Spanish or, dare I say,
>Esperanto.

No, you dare not.  I have yet to meet a planned language whose
orthography wouldn't be at least as reasonable as that of Spanish.

>I LIKE English, but I'm also damned
>glad I learned how to write and speak it natively, or else I'd go nuts.

I'm bloody glad I didn't have to learn to write it natively.
Bulgarian kids take it for granted that once they have learned all the
letters, they can read and (albeit not always correctly) write any
word they may come across.  Rather a good feeling to have after you've
been going to school for just a few weeks.  (I know this from
observations, not from my own experience, for I was taught to read and
write at home long before I went to school.)  I've always wondered how
English-speaking kids manage without this kind of feeling.

Since my English comes chiefly from reading, it makes sense for me to
know how to spell all English words I know.  This doesn't necessarily
imply that I know how to _pronounce_ all of them.

I used to work as a microcomputer cluster consultant at Brandeis, and
I often found it easier to proofread people's documents instead of
explaining to them how to use the spelling checker.
-- 
---- --- -- -  Long Live the Rose and the Heather!  - -- --- ----
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
Newsgroups: sci.lang