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Bruce you wrote:
"As a poor speller I've  always felt that our alphabet is a poor fit to our
language. It doesn't seem to  fit Japanese, Chinese, or Hawaiian any better. "

In defense of the  western alphabet ( it's a tough job --somebody's gotta
do it!), the  alphabet used to write down English and other western European
languages is  beautifully suited to writing down Japanese, Chinese, and a
surprisingly large  collection of other languages. And in fact, "spelling" these
languages in the  western alphabet, once you've learned a small handful of
rules, is completely  trivial --literally child's play. In a great many languages,
the verb "to spell"  does not exist, and a "spelling bee" would seem like a
joke.

The English  language is relatively unique in that it is composed of archaic,
fossilized  spellings that once upon a time represented the real
pronunciation. Consider the  word "eight". Centuries ago, it was pronounced more or less
the way it's spelled  today (with the rule that "gh" represented something like
the sound in German  "acht"). Over time, the pronunciation evolved, but the
writing did not. A large  number of the weird "silent letters" that we deal
with in English originate this  way. Also, English has a rich sound structure
with lots of sounds that are  represented by pairs of letter or not represented
at all in spelling. By  contrast, some languages have very sparse sound
systems. Japanese and Finnish  are good examples of this. To write English
effectively, we really ought to have  about fifteen to twenty more letters (I say this
only in principle --it would  never happen). But you can write down Japanese
and Finnish with fewer letters  than the usual 26 in our alphabet, and nearly
every word is pronounced exactly  the way it's written.

-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N  72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars

   

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