Re: Knowing when to use "it's" and "its"
- From: Iain <iain_inkster@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 15:05:49 -0700 (PDT)
On Jul 2, 6:39 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 2, 1:29 pm, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 1, 11:05 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 1, 3:05 pm, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 1, 12:46 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 1, 5:04 am, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 30, 4:18 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 30, 10:47 am, Iain <iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 30, 12:53 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 30, 5:13 am, Ruud Harmsen <realemailons...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:59:55 -0700 (PDT): Iain
<iain_inks...@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:
What would you do with English spelling, given Academy-Francais
powers?
Keep it as it is.
Throw out the mistakenly introduced "etymological letters" like the b
in debt and the s in island.
Why not, by the same token, also throw out false phonetical letters,
such as by changing "tear" to "teer"?
Because (to take your example of <ea> vs. <ee>) they represent
historically different vowels that happened to merge in what came to
be the standard language, but there are to this day varieties of
English in which the words that are spelled differently are pronounced
differently.
As a Scotsman I can certainly sympathise -- many words here which are
normally considered to be pronounced the same worldwide are pronounced
differently in Scotland. For example, Or and Oar.
So you knew the answer to your own question!
Nope. Because the point I made does not apply everywhere. For example,
I cannot think of any justification at all for the E at the end of
"medicine". Nor can I think of a reason why
You really shouldn't set yourself up for rude comments about your
thinking ability!
Haven't. If you make such comments, they are non sequiturs not worthy
of subsequiturs.
Just because _you_ "cannot think of" a reason for this or that doesn't
mean there aren't very good reasons for this or that.
It's not like these questions have never been
discussed over the past 400 years or so.
So?
You could _read_ the discussions in books.
V cannot be doubled and
must always be followed by an E if it would otherwise be last. To
remove these rules would not interfere with morphemic clarity, and if
anything would almost unilaterally improve phonemic accuracy. We could
have Liv, Alive, Live, Livving, etc, not to mention Hav. It would be
nice to kill the E in Were also. Just tidy the commonplace words a
little, so that it's not a total shambles.
English spelling is not and has never been surface-phonemic (let alone
phonetic). English spelling maintains the visual integrity of
_morphemes_.
Point?
The V E -- an example I chose for a good reason -- maintains neither
morphemic integrity nor phonemic integrity. You really shouldn't set
yourself up for rude comments about your ability to think pertinently.
> > You described English spelling as being nice, for this and that
reason. I'm asking -- why not make it even nicer, in the same respects
that you already think are nice?
You have a very short-sighted view of "nice."
What on Earth are you talking about?
Like all spelling tamperers (my new name for spelling "reformers"),
you are operating with the simplistic notion that a one-to-one letter-
to-phoneme equivalence is the ideal orthographic system in all
circumstances.
Nope.
~Iain
.
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