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From: rharmsen@knoware.nl (Ruud Harmsen)
Subject: Re: Lunatic orthography (was Re: Esperanto as a stepping stone?
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In article <D27L7o.6o2@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
>Subject: Re: Lunatic orthography (was Re: Esperanto as a stepping stone?
>Date: Tue, 10 Jan 1995 21:33:22 GMT
>And since your 
>scheme represents the schwa with various letters anyway (a in "kansistant", 
>o in "ov", e in "enuf"), why bother to write "kansistant" rather than 
>"konsistent"?  
Well, the "ov" was a typo (I make mistakes in my own new system already, which 
illustrates that spelling reform doesn't make spelling easier, not 
initially anyway), should have been "av", and enuf doesn't have a schwa, at 
least that's what I thought (could also be written innuf in my system), but 
how do I know: I'm not native English-speaking, and more familiar with 
British than with American pronounciation. I can imagine it does have a schwa 
most of the time in American pr., and perhaps in Britain as well.

>My counterproposal is not to come up with any scheme at all; just stop 
>correcting students' spelling.  In a generation or two, English speakers
>would spontaneously generate a reformed orthography, retaining what is
>most useful from the past while eliminating most of the worst exceptions.
>Many common misspellings (e.g. "seperate" for "separate") are more
>rational than the standard spelling.
Strange though it may seem, having proposed a spelling reform here, I agree 
with the first part "My counterproposal is not to come up with any scheme at 
all" !
The current spelling is weird, but I like it! And I wonder if it's really so 
much more difficult than a consistent system, which represents phonemes as 
letter combinations, because fast readers don't spell out words, but 
recognize patterns.
