LL-L "Orthography" 2006.01.09 (03) [E]

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09 January 2006 * Volume 03
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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2006.01.08 (02) [E]

Hello Sandy and fellow Lowlanders'

>    o    evidence from psychology suggest that many
>         of the irregularities in English spelling make
>         reading easier: for example, when homophones
>         are spelled differently the information is
>         processed slightly faster by the reader;

There's some argument also that the irregularities of English are (a)
not as irregular as they first seem, and (b) that some of the
irregularities keep related words together in the mind, such as 'to
sign' and 'signature'. I find point (b) a bit moot, in that the
text-books only ever seem to give words with silent g versus pronounced
g as examples, and some of the examples such as 'design' and
'designation' haven't got much to do with each other anymore due to
change in meaning.

>    o    there's so much literature in English that
>         students and many others would have to be
>         able to read both systems for many decades;
And all that literature would perhaps have to be transcribed, and that 
modern poetry in the shape of flowers and vases etc (I hope I don't
sound too disparaging about it ;-)) would have to be rewritten in order
to retain its visual shape.

But basically, people are very resistant to spelling reforms - really 
drastic ones (such as that from Old Irish to Middle/Modern Irish) seem 
to occur only under drastic circumstances (change of technology/ the 
scriptoria in the monasteries being sacked by Vikings). Am I right in 
thinking that German was recently reformed to remove umlauts, etc, but 
that that reformation was rejected also?

TTFN, Paul Tatum.

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