h a l f b a k e r yAmbivalent? Are you sure?
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Apply the rules of stupidly spelled words to the entire
English
launguage, modeling them after such abominations as
"psychiatry", "gnome", "honest" etc.
The purpose of these spellings is to keep the riff-raff out
of
the spelling pool so why not go all the way?
I think in days of yore
people would write and speak in
Latin
for just this purpose. "Of course you don't understand
what
I'm saying, you're a prole."
This would be another approach.
why the OED is flexible
https://en.wikipedi...rgeon_of_Crowthorne
[pertinax, Sep 24 2017]
[link]
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The proles could be educated only to speak and understand Newspeak. That would be a simple and effective solution. |
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No. The reason people wrote in Latin during the Middle Ages was
much the same reason Chinese and Russians write in English
today. Had it not been for Latin, Galileo would have had to learn
Polish (or possibly German) to read Copernicus, so he probably
wouldn't have. |
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And the reason for counter-intuitive spellings today is not to
exclude people, but to connect them ... with other times and
places. For example, the silent letters in "knight" remind us,
silently, that Sir so-and-so is supposed to be a servant (German
"knecht"). |
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Ah, that would explain why when I was a kid growing
up in the ghetto they'd speak latin at the local
church. |
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As far as spelling knight with a k to remind us that Sir
So-So was supposed to be a servant, it's not working. |
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Spelling errors however have been corrected. |
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I had a go at this here a while back. |
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English only pretends to have an alphabet. In reality, each
component of a word is a collection of symbols which
represent an idea, a little like Chinese, except that with
Chinese the shapes of the characters sometimes give you a
chance to guess the meaning or pronunciation. This does
not occur in our language. |
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Not really. The dictionary started out as a sort of open-source project. It was the Linux of the nineteenth century. There's an entertaining book about this. |
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Yes, but that was a post-factum decision. It wasn't why the church was using Latin in the first place. |
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It is. Little ever changes in the world of fossilized bugs. They ain't makin' 'em no more ... |
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[Ian], your problem would be solved if they could only find
fossilised insect automata. |
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Pertinax, I'd be interested to know if there's a
reference to all words with horrific spellings
explaining silent letters and such. Any such resource?
I'm guessing at least some are just borrowed from
other languages where we changed the pronunciation
but didn't bother to change the spelling. |
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// The precise details of how proto-insects acquired flight and became flying insects are unknown // |
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Did they not just buy airline tickets, then ? |
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//precisely how entertaining?// It seems a movie was made of it,
though I haven't seen said movie. |
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// a reference to all words with horrific spellings // |
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Not exactly. I mean, the OED provides the history of each word,
but it includes words which are easy to spell, and not just horrific
ones. |
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//launguage// now was that on purpose? |
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Also: the English spelling of modelling might have also
been intended to keep some new continent populations
guessing. See also "colour" and so on. |
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// some new continent populations guessing. // |
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What about the incontinent ? |
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We don't let them guess. Our experiment in letting them vote
didn't turn out so well, so we're not going to extend privileges
further. |
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