On 4 Aug 2005, at 11:44, Craig Ringer wrote: > (Note: I'm just poking fun at the Americans here re misspelling. It's > a dialect; I can deal with that.)
As a stuent of linguistics (native of western US), permit me a few observations. 1) All languages have dialects and always will. The greater the number of speakers of the language, the greater the number and the degree of the variances. 2) Writing systems (graphemics) are a part of the dialect and there weill always be variations. 3) English sucks as an international language from many aspects. First, English uses some phonetic sounds that are very rare among the world's languages and, therefore, very hard for foreigners to master -- e.g., the retroflex r, among others. Second, English has some bizarre ways of creating questions (do insertion, wh- movement) that are almost unique among the world's languages and, therefore, extremely difficult for foreigners to master. Third, because English is a bastard language with a germanic base and a romance top layer, we have a morphology that is incomprehensible to a non-native. For example, words of Latin origin can take only certain suffixes and prefixes and words of Germanic origin can take only other suffixes and prefixes. And finally, the spelling system is about 300 years past due for an update, not that it was ever close to accurate from the beginning. So when y'all bitch about color vs colour, you have no idea how deep the problem really goes. In the meantime, intelligent and educated persons worldwide understand that diversity is the wealth of our species and rejoice in our differences. And as a final note, one of my passions is spelling reform for English. If I accomplish that, and nothing else, my life will have been worth living. I will shut up now.
