gungasnake wrote:What are your pet peeves re English usage?
Simple answer to that one: there's no rational way to spell anything in English. Somebody like St. Cyril needs to develop a reasonable phoenetic alphabet for English; at present, we don't really have one.
This has been discussed before, Gunga, but like most things difficult, it takes a bit of time and effort to get your brain wrapped around the reality. Rumors and old wives tales are easy to grasp.
You have rationally, ie. correctly spelled every word, ... oops, ... you blew 'phonetic'. Not to worry, it happens to us all.
Read this five times and each time think about it before you read it again.
Quote:
... writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking, which we do not hear, but the abstract units of language underlying them, which we do hear."
Obviously, alphabets do not and should not correspond to sounds; at best they correspond to the phonemes specified in the mental dictionary. The actual sounds are different in different contexts, so true phonetic spelling would only obscure their underlying identity.
The surface sounds [JTT: the ones that caused all who read your post to give it the same meaning, thoughthe pronunciation may well have differed due to dialectal differences] are predictable by phonological rules, though, so there is no need to clutter up the page with symbols for the actual sounds; the reader needs only the abstract blueprint for a word and can flesh out the sound if needed."
Pay particular attention to this next part.
Quote:Moreover, since dialects separated by time and space often differ most in the phonological rules that convert mental dictionary entries into pronunciations, a spelling corresponding to the underlying entries, not the sounds, can be widely shared. ... The goal of reading, after all, is to understand the text, not to pronounce it.
Here at A2K, we can 'talk' to Walter, McTag,
Thomas and many others from many other languages and we don't have to give a hoot about their foreign accents.
Hell, can you imagine even for the North American continent what a Tower of Babel this site would be if everyone sought to phonetisize their writing? I could well be puzzling over Squinney and Bear's writings or wading thru [just one borough] a New Yorker's 'speech'.
No one really reads what we write, that's an illusion. We absorb, for lack of a more apt description, the meaning on the page with no regard to the actual sounds.
Think about it, for it clearly illustrates the beauty and complexity of language. We all absorb meaning, even though we are separated by thousands of miles. The surface sounds have no meaning, for there are none, but the underlying language is full of meaning.
If we were reading one dialect's phonetics, we'd be puzzling over sounds instead of instantly capturing the meaning.
{everything contained within the quote boxes is from The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker}
I admit, I use it now and then, like other Latinism, more in German, but in English as well.)
