On Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 09:42 AM, Jag wrote: <snipped> > It seems that more of your arguments boil down to a phonetic alphabet > would be difficult to understand. Well, I'll state the claim that a > phonetic alphabet would be no different from the spoken word, so any > argument about why english is not good with a phonetic language, is an > argument about why english is not good as a spoken language. And > english seems to have served just fine as a spoken language for a good > number of centuries. > > Jag English has a long and twisted history which led to its current state. First English, despite, everything, is still a Germanic lanquage, not a Romance lanquage. Way back, Old English was very much a dialect of German but it evolved and the French via William I got involved, piling on all sorts of Frenchisms. Later, greek and latin words were piled on. Now we have a mess but a wonderful mess. I mean, how many laquages made D'oh an official word?