[Fwd: Re: English Spelling]

[A. Vine]

All,
A posting from the recent intense discussion on English Spelling on the Unicode
list.
Andrea


> ...
[On the English language:]
> Why don't they use Cyrillic instead?

I faintly remember a Science Fiction story (sorry, no title or author) where
the hero, arriving from a time journey into the England of a future century,
was surprised to see everything written in Cyrillic. He was told after the
Soviet Union got democratic, most European countries joined it, and they
started to use to write place names on road signs throughout that Union both
Latin and Cyrillic. As the Cyrillic writings for English names were chosen
phonetical [I imagine making use of the whole repertoire of Extended
Cyrillic] and "logical", the English people adopted it later for their
whole language, and only specialized historicians are still able to read the
awkward Latin writing of the past.
Surely not written by a linguist, but a thought with some appeal.

Best Regards
Karl Pentzlin
AC&S Analysis Consulting & Software GmbH
München, Germany