LL-L "Orthography" 2006.01.12 (03) [E]

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12 January 2006 * Volume 03
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From: Ben J. Bloomgren <godsquad at cox.net>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2006.01.11 (03) [E]

Ingmar wrote:

About English spelling supposedly easier and faster to understand the way
it is now: I don't see how that can be tested objectively , because
everyone has learned and is used to the present orthography, so that looks
familiar, is recognizable etc. and nobody is used to a reformed spelling.

As a blind person, I cannot imagine the frustration that I would have should
English suddenly change up its spelling. The programmers who wrote the code
for the screenreader that I used tried to build flow into their speech
synthesizers. Though it is far from human, it's sure good. If we suddenly
changed out something along the lines of there/their to thare or ðer, this
program would drive us all mad, for it wouldn't know what to do with the
weird combinations. That's just another point to be made about orthographic
changes.
Ben

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Orthography

Hi, Ben!

Not to belittle your point, let me state that it would probably take 
programmers no more than a few days to write scripts that would create new 
programs or extend or convert existing ones to whatever new orthography, 
delivering the same sort of results.  That would be a relatively small 
technical matter.  In fact, if the spelling were phonemic, it would require 
much less work, for the pronunciation would not necessarily need to be 
programmed in for each word.

But this will probably never happen anyway, given people's fear-based 
defense of the status quo.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron 

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