RE: English Spelling

From: Hart, Edwin F. (Edwin.Hart@jhuapl.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 08 1999 - 13:53:10 EST


English spelling versus pronunciation is terrible. (Spelling was my worst
subject in elementary school except for handwriting. Now, I just blame all
of my spelling mistakes on poor typing.)

However, in his keynote at IUC 14 in Boston, Thomas Milo asked if the
purpose of writing was to show you how to pronounce a word but not
necessarily its meaning or to convey its meaning but not necessarily
pronunciation. Until his comment, I had always decried spelling in English.
I still hate English spelling but I have a little more appreciation of the
broader issue that Thomas raised.

I really enjoyed Andrea's pointer to the web site.

Ed

Edwin F. Hart
edwin.hart@jhuapl.edu
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Road
Laurel, MD 20723-6099
USA
+1-443-778-6926 (Baltimore area)
+1-240-228-6926 (Washington, DC area)
+1-443-778-1093 (fax)
+1-240-228-1093 (fax)

-----Original Message-----
From: A. Vine [mailto:avine@eng.sun.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 1999 13:21
To: Unicode List
Cc: Unicode List
Subject: Re: Spelling [was: Multilingual Documents]

As far as I know, the poem below is called "The Chaos" and was written by G.
Nolst Trenite, a.k.a. Charivarius (1870-1946). See
http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/english.html

-- 
Andrea Vine, avine@eng.sun.com
Sun-Netscape Alliance i18n architect
Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows.
-- Dr. Dave Farber (father of SNOBOL and one of the creators of Token Ring)



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