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From: rharmsen@knoware.nl (Ruud Harmsen)
Subject: English orthography is OK as it is.
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Date: Sun, 15 Jan 1995 04:19:46 GMT
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I think there are strong arguments for keeping the orthography of English as 
it is. It isn't even as difficult as it seems. The reason, in my opinion, 
is that it is a misconception that the English spelling is an alphabetic 
spelling. Instead, it uses pictures for words, roughly in the same manner as 
Chinese. Only parts of these pictures happen to resemble alphabetic symbols 
used for some other languages. (I'm not trying to be funny, believe me).
And because skilled readers don't spell out individual letters, but recognize 
pictures, and associate ideas with them (that's how the brain works), it's not 
really a problem, as long as the same picture is used consistently for the 
same words. And this in English is the case to a large extent.

In fact the spelling of Dutch, which uses the alphabetic picture-parts much 
more consistently than does English, is MORE difficult than the English 
spelling. The reason that here the same word (or two strongly related words, 
in a different but very similar grammatical category, e.g. both verbs), can be 
spelt in different ways, so people don't know which picture to use for a word, 
when are writing. Example: 
het is gebeurd (it has happened)
het gebeurt (it happens).

Both words "gebeur[dt]" sound exactly the same, (Dutch has no final voiced 
consonants), and they are both verbal forms, not quite the same kind of verbs, 
but close enough to confuse people. And because "gebeurd" is written more 
often (due to a tendency to use passive forms in Dutch), many people tend to 
write "het gebeurd" with an incorrect -d.

There are probably examples of this in English too, but I think far less.

