From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!uwvax!jon Newsgroups: net.nlang Title: silent letters Article-I.D.: uwvax.479 Posted: Tue Jul 13 14:19:13 1982 Received: Thu Jul 15 03:45:29 1982 Although some silent letters could be ( the gh in nite, the ugh in altho ) or have been ( the ue in catalog, the te in cigaret, the e in employe ) done away with, others actually are important to the structure of the word. Although the n in government is often dropped, it makes more sense to leave it in than to try to explain that in joining govern and -ment you drop the n. Similarly for toward(s), which would be difficult to break down if spelled tord. (not that other words aren't already compressed that way, but why make things worse) The problem with total spelling reform, besides the insurmountable question of whose pronunciation of Mary, merry and marry to codify, is that phonetic spelling obscures other properties of words. z.B. 'title' --> 'titular'. The difference in pronunciation is obscured by the current spelling, the similarity in structure would be obscured by switching to the international phonetic alphabet. A spelling reform I could support would get rid of silly inconsistencies and replace a lot of rules with a few rules, but would not insist on a bijection between sounds and letters. A letter might have a few different pronunciations, depending on context and one a few regular rules. By the way, Pablo, I finally figured out why 'ov' makes my skin crawl. 'Ov' doesn't look like an English word, since 'v' followed by 'e' is a fairly regular rule at the ends of words, but it does look like the overly cutesy 'luv', which made my skin crawl before netnews was invented.