Ar 20:12 -0700 1999-08-22, scríobh peter_constable@sil.org:
> I think you were responding to someone else. At any rate, I
> don't think any of us disagree that English orthography isn't
> the easiest to learn. I think there is a lot of objection,
> though, that the arguments in support of changing to something
> like CC do not come anywhere close to the arguments against it.
Wijk notes that his 6-year-old son, starting school in New York in 1950,
read three books in his first year: We Look and See, We Work and Play, and
We Come and Go, which contained mostly pictures and a total of 58 different
words. Three years later back in Sweden his 7-year-old daughter read only
one book in her first year, which had 125 pages of text and nearly 1900
different words. Of course there are many issues involved (and perhaps
English education has improved since 1950) but as Wijk points out, Swedish
spelling is by no means entirely phonetic either.
> Again, I think the best option for reforming English
> orthography would be a set of minor changes, as Michael Everson
> suggested. As for the objection you raised in another message,
> that too many people are too fixed in their ways and that it
> simply wouldn't fly, the fact that such changes have been done
> successfully for other European languages (and, I gather, the
> recent minor changes made for German appear to be succeding,
> albeit with some pain) indicates that this objection is, in the
> general case, not valid.
As I say it seems to me that the non-native users of English could improve
the tool they must use by applying a reform in the absence of a desire to
do so by the natives.
I suppose I'm done with this thread. Maybe I could provide a short text in
Regularized English, if there were an interest in seeing one, before we
return to the topic of Unicode....
-- Michael Everson * Everson Gunn Teoranta * http://www.indigo.ie/egt 15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland Guthán: +353 1 478 2597 ** Facsa: +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire
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