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.)