I Can't Believe I Just Heard This

I'll bet you heard OmSig David!

He is always spouting off about spelling that way.

I think it is ridiculous and incomprehensible.

Hi Boomerang!

It was one of our local radio stations and they said it came from "some news somewhere" but I didn't catch that part. It floored me though. I can't imagine anyone thinking that this would ever catch on.

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. believed in the use of phonetic spelling, and attempted to implement it when he was President. However, he did not issue any executive orders on the subject, as he apparently had the wisdom to recognize that he could not enforce it by fiat. His efforts to encourage phonetic spelling were a signal failure.

I suspect that there will always be people who attempt this, and that there will always be people who will deride them for it. It has happened before though, and was once successful. Noah Webster decided that spelling should be "rationalized" for American children. Therefore, he changed "centre" to "center," and all of the "-our" words to "-or" (as in colour/color, honour/honor, humour/humor). Frequently, English and other English-speakers deride the Americans for this. However, they ignore that Noah Webster also changed "magick" to "magic" and "musick" to "music," and that all English-speakers now follow those spellings. There are other examples as well, but i disremember them.

Benjamin Franklin was also one that pushed a phonetic alphabet.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm

He supposedly wrote most of his personal notes using his own alphabet - and it drove many of his friends and family nuts!

The well documented overview is that language, like clothes, has several functions. It changes and adapts organically Each generation and social corpus tends to cling to its own "fashion" but social, geopolitical and technological change have an inevitable impact.

i've never quite grasped why we have silent letters. Why do we put them in the spelling if were not gonna say them.

I'll ditto Fresco's response on this.

As much as I personally prefer some spellings, it's important to remember that language isn't stagnant.

(in other words, your poll options don't give me anything to work with)

graemedaulby,

http://www.learnenglish.org.uk/grammar/archive/silentletters01.html

Many idiosyncracies in English spelling point to historical origins. Language is a vehicle for cultural transmission. An analogy with clothes is the buttons on the cuff of a man's jacket which used to be functional in swordplay by widening the sleeve.

And then there was the dutch who operated the publishing houses in New Amsterdam.