From: utzoo!watmath!dssg
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Title: Re: Spelling is not language
Article-I.D.: watmath.3073
Posted: Thu Jul 22 10:03:48 1982
Received: Fri Jul 23 00:12:02 1982

	'Spelling island with an "s" is simply repeating an error forever.'

	What a crock!
	Spelling island without an "s" (iland? ailand? eyelund? ilnd?) is
the error!  Have you ever seen a phonetic alphabet or language?  Next you'll
be criticising the structure of the grammar, and we will have another die-hard
Loglan advocate on our hands.
	I suppose that before I get right into this I should give a couple of
caveats:  I have no idea what (if anything) originally spawned rpvalliende's
message; and I am the first to admit that English spelling is at times far
from logical.  Read on at your own peril.
	In the first place, spelling has nothing to do with the spoken
language.  It has to do with the written language.  Anyone who feels that the
language; it is the written language.  Rarely are the two the same, and for
that matter it would be a great loss if they were.  Anyone who feels that the
two are or should be is the same kind of person whose news articles are filled
with small i's standing alone, and uncapitalised first words of sentences, and
numerous random punctuation marks like '...', and apostrophe-less contractions,
and so on.  Every time I see such a mess, my eyes wince in pain and my brain
strains to seek out the true meaning.  Surely there can be nothing more
dignified than the honest effort to transmit information from one soul to
another, except maybe the elevation of that effort to the point of making it
via a permanent record, to be standardised and respected as a mode of
communication.  It is, after all, the written language that raises us above
the level of savages, and makes civilisation possible; to bastardise such
a tradition with vagrancies of the moment and laziness of finger seems like
vandalism to me.
	Then there is pronunciation.  If anyone feels that a written word
(no matter how phonetically spelt) can have only one pronunciation, I invite
him to visit the Ottawa Valley, New Jersey, Alabama, and Texas, to name a few.
Far more important, however, than person or place, is the time.  Evolution of
the spoken language is at once the most subtle and the largest factor in
affecting pronunciation; it is far-reaching and unpredictable.  Ancient
English was spoken in a manner far different than today, even more so than
the spelling may indicate.  Vowel sounds are particularly hard to fix and/or
categorise, and what I think of as naturally being an 'ai' sound can easily
be interpreted by others as 'e', 'i', 'a', or various double-vowel constructs
to numerous to mention.  Twenty or even ten years from now the spoken language
may have evolved into a form that differs from today's in many ways, but
hopefully no moron will have made phonetic spelling the rule and what I write
now will still be understood.
	True, nothing can be permanent, and any Shakespeare fan will admit to
the difficulty; but think of trying to understand phonetic Shakespeare!
	In the third place, to me it is a point of honour to correctly spell
every word I write.  This is not my language, and if I randomly decide how
words I think are peculiar should be spelt, I have descended to the level of
the man who scrawls an 'X' for his signature.
	Okay, so upward compatibility may not be an all-encompassing rule.
But even given the chance to alter every person on the globe's idea of what
correct English spelling is, I don't think enough would be gained, and far
too much would be lost.  The 'peculiar' spelling of some words is more often
than not a hint as to the origin of the word -- if dictionaries are used as
sources of information rather than as the slap of the teacher's rule, insights
into meaning can leap from the page.
	I really didn't mean this article to be as hot as it may sound, but
working in this field has put me in far too much contact with disrespect for
the written language.
			Respectfully yours,
					Mark Ingram
					CCNG (Distributed Systems)