warbi wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- >> On Wed, Dec 15, 2004 at 01:51:21PM -0600, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: >> >>> [English is] widely reported to be among the hardest of the >>> alphabetic languages (let's not get into the difficulty of becoming >>> literate in chinese!), actually. And I don't believe "spelling" is >>> a standard school subject much of anywhere else. >> >> I can believe that. When I was studying Russian and found out that >> things are spelled like they're pronounced and pronounced like >> they're spell, it was heavenly. -- >> "Everybody generalizes from one example. At least, I do." >> Steve Brust, Message >> <5.1.0.14.0.20030402171954.02c5bd00 at localhost> >> > Until you realized that the nouns and adjectives had declensions > and the verbs are irregular more often than not! lol warbi I still preferred its phonetic alphabet. On the other hand, spelling "correctly" is something relatively new for English speakers. Read Lewis and Clarke's journals and wonder how similar their language was to ours. It's interesting to note that Colonists can be more phonetic in our pronunciation than Brits are. We had a large percentage of our ancestors who were literate when they learned English - and learned words by reading them. Most of Brits had ancestors who learned the language before they were literate and learned the words by hearing them.