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2006-07-07 Home Front: Culture Wars

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Posted by tu3031 2006-07-07 16:37|| || Front Page|| [3 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 lol at the beavis comment, awesome!

Posted by bombay">bombay 2006-07-07 17:25|| 2006-07-07 17:25|| Front Page Top

#2 These clowns need to grow up and get a life.

Or, they could push for simpler spelling of German. In Germany.

Posted by Barbara Skolaut">Barbara Skolaut 2006-07-07 18:05|| http://ariellestjohndesigns.com]">[http://ariellestjohndesigns.com] 2006-07-07 18:05|| Front Page Top

#3 Wutz nxt on th ujendu - NuSp33k?

Posted by Xbalanke 2006-07-07 18:17|| 2006-07-07 18:17|| Front Page Top

#4 alredy hav doblesp33k...

F u cn rd ths u cnt spel wrth a drn.

Posted by CrazyFool 2006-07-07 18:20|| 2006-07-07 18:20|| Front Page Top

#5 Which accent gets used? He says uennyon I say eunyun.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-07-07 18:22|| 2006-07-07 18:22|| Front Page Top

#6 Understandable, a good idea in theory, but hard to implement-at least if spelling is to be manageable for both old school and new school English readers at the same time. And just imagine how many different spellings there would then be between British English and American English? How about Aussie English!

I would promote direct instruction in phonics to help students of all ages spell (and read) better.

As far as the rule-breakers and oddball spellings? Keep the language intact; it's complicated, but it's a beauty.

Posted by Jules 2006-07-07 18:57|| 2006-07-07 18:57|| Front Page Top

#7 We will go completely metric first.

Posted by Penguin 2006-07-07 19:00|| 2006-07-07 19:00|| Front Page Top

#8 DAMN IT!!!

I'll always spell it GHOTI as long as they swim in the sea!!!!!

Umm, for the iggerant, that's GH as in Tough; O as in women and TI as in nation. Some people spell it fish.

Posted by AlanC">AlanC 2006-07-07 19:42|| 2006-07-07 19:42|| Front Page Top

#9 This "Simplified Spelling" joke is so old it's bald on top.
I first read this in Readers Digest somewhere around 1960 or so.

Posted by Redneck Jim 2006-07-07 20:34|| 2006-07-07 20:34|| Front Page Top

#10 An irony is their trying to force this, when it is happening on its own. An unexpurgated Websters from before 1900 is filled with anachronistic words that have been utterly discarded from the colloquial. Reading it is almost funny. And every reason to believe this evolution in english will continue.

The language advances first from a simple tongue with a minimum of words, then achieves a plateau of maximum communication for literate people. But then it continues to increase complexity with parochialism and nuances that are only used by an elite, such as Doctors and lawyers.

Only a few of these words become popularized, adopted into the common language along with words from other languages, and new words such as slang.

But all depends on usage. Too simple, and nuance is lost. Too complex, and it becomes ill-used. But over time, Darwinism changes the tongue through usage. And thus "light" becomes "lite", "through" becomes "thru", and "enough" becomes "enuf".

And writers stop using quotation marks.

The evolution also occurs in punctuation. The British are now discarding the periods in Mr., Dr., etc., and are now only using one space after a colon. The semi-colon and the ampersand are so ill-used that they may soon just be used for computer code.

Spoken language adapts likewise. The master vowel of english (and some German) is becoming the "schwa", which is shown as an upside-down letter 'e' (producing an "eh" sound). This is because it is often substituted for most other vowels, long or short. In german this is replacing "das, der, die", with "deh", much like the english "the".

Spoken english with the schwa instead of other vowels is much easier for people to understand if their native language has different rules for word emphasis, like spanish.

The ability of english to be so adaptable makes it the world's premier language, so that in another 100 years, it may be a completely different tongue, yet if we heard it, we would have a pretty clear understanding of what had been said. As much as if we heard english of 100 years ago.

Posted by Anonymoose 2006-07-07 21:38|| 2006-07-07 21:38|| Front Page Top

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