On Sat, 6 Jul 2002 23:19:59 -0400, Carroll Grigsby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Saturday 06 July 2002 10:04 pm, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: > > On Sat, 6 Jul 2002 20:46:24 -0400, Carroll Grigsby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > As a side note, has anyone ever calculated the cumulative cost of time, > > > ink and paper that is wasted on all of of those extra u's used in British > > > spelling? > > > > They're not "wasted". The 'u' moderates the sound of the 'o' so that it is > > not too hard. The 'o' is emphasised more in the word 'or' than in the word > > 'colour'. In that way, the 'u' is actually phonetic in (British) English. > > OK, if I follow your line of reasoning, does that mean that we'd need > separate spell checkers to account for each regional dialect? Or are we all > supposed to sound like BBC announcers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hnews readers?
Ideally we wouldn't need separate spell checkers [or should that be 'chequers' :) ]. > I notice that you ducked the "gh" ==> "eff" thing. Or is "night" supposed to > be pronounced "nift"? > > And a happy Fourth of July to you, sir. (Hmmm... why is it "fourth" and not > "forth"? Sounds the same to me.) I wasn't ducking. English is quite an odd language and I agree with you. A lot of the problems stem from written usage. Literature might become very confusing if we replaced 'there', 'their' and 'they're' with a simple 'there'. Many others stem from pronunciation. As somebody who pronounces words in the traditional 'British' manner, British spellings make sense to me. Similarly, American spellings might make more sense to an American. Wouldn't it be great if we could just drop English and speak Esperanto instead :) -- Sridhar Dhanapalan "Hey, that is an implementation issue, not a design issue, so that's the point where I don't care all that much any more. I'd not be all that likely to use this feature (I still do "zcat < file.tar.gz | tar xvf -" instead of using "tar zxvf file.tar.gz", because I'm an old-fashioned old fogey. I don't need my tar-files auto-mounted for me)." -- Linus Torvalds
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