From: utzoo!watmath!rvpalliende
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Title: Spelling is not language
Article-I.D.: watmath.3071
Posted: Thu Jul 22 00:49:47 1982
Received: Thu Jul 22 04:31:50 1982

Why do so many people believe that spelling is the same
as language?
As my Anth103 prof remarked in the first class, the course (The Nature Of
Language) would only deal with spoken language, because spelling
is only a representation ov language. Moreover there is at least one
language with two completely different spellings. Serbo-Croatian
may be spelled either in Roman or Cyrillic(sp?) characters, but
the language continues to be the same.
English spelling is human indeed, being
unpredictable and static. Spelling island with an "s" is simply
repeating an error forever. Is that really necessary?
What I resent the most is the judging ov a person by his/her/its/their
spelling as if there weren't more important things in life. (Ov course,
that last comment isn't language related, but culture related.)