Italian as a "Pure" Language

David L. White dlwhite at texas.net
Sat Mar 17 05:06:25 UTC 2001


> ``The complexity of the English and French written languages stems from
> historical events that have introduced spellings from other languages, while,
> in comparison, Italian has remained quite pure,'' said Eraldo Paulesu of the
> University of Milan Bicocca, the lead author of the study.

        Heavens to Betsy, that's really too much to go for.  Most of the
difficulties in English spellings come from things like "through", "enough",
"do", "bead" vs. "head", and "now" vs. "mow", which are quite native.
Things like "pizza" or even "frail" have very little to do with it.  The
main advantage Italian has, to simplify a bit, is that it did not go through
the Great Vowel Shift.

Dr. David L. White



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