Personally, i am also opposed to "Q" and "X" . . . i feel they humiliate any right-thinking speaker of the language, and ought to be done away with . . .
I like the rounded C, preferable to the angular K which also has foreign connotations. More suitable for karma, khaki, kaleidoscopes, kleptocracies. But CK is silly. Not sure I like the Welsh using hard C before E, it feels wrong. Ceridwen, shortened to Ceri = Kerry. It's confusing.
And why did the makers of the perfectly good cleaning cream called JIF rationalise it to CIF? I would say that even though J can be used for about 5 different sounds, C is even more treacherous.
And there was me thinking Kerry was purely Irish.
Which is a minefield of pronunciations (Naimh, Siobhan...)
Setanta wrote:Personally, i am also opposed to "Q" and "X" . . . i feel they humiliate any right-thinking speaker of the language, and ought to be done away with . . .
I couldn't agree more. Prior to the Norman incursion into the British Isles in 1066, neither letter was much in use, if at all.
kwene was the usual spelling for what later became
queen[/], for example. The problem with 'x' is the inconsistency of its use. It's ks sound, but sometimes it's spelled with an 'x'. sometimes with 'cks' etc.
Clary, the problem with 'j', as you say, is that, contrary to 'c', which represents no sound, 'j' represents too many different sounds. It can be 'zh' or 'dzh' or, in some loan-words from the Spanish, it's 'h'.
English is actually a very easy and simple language. (I say this as a non-native speaker.) but the spelling is beyond belief.
Elimination of 'c' would require 'ch' to be replaced with something akin to 'tsh' or 'q' could expand its role, muqh to Sentanta's dismay. All this reminds me of a Monty Python skit portraying the travails of a gentlemen who, unable to say the hard 'c' sound, was forced to substitute it with 'b'. A snippet for your amusement:
Mr. Smoketoomuch:
Yes, that's right. I'm afraid I have a speech impediment. I can't pronounce the letter B.
Mr. Bounder:
Uh, C.
Mr. Smoketoomuch:
Yes, that's right, B. It's all due to a trauma I suffered when I was a schoolboy. I was attacked by a Siamese bat.
Mr. Bounder:
Uh, ah, a Siamese cat.
Mr. Smoketoomuch:
No, a Siamese bat. They're more dangerous.
Mr. Bounder:
Listen...can you say the letter K?
Mr. Smoketoomuch:
Oh, yes. Khaki, kettle, Kipling, Khomeini, Kellog's Born Flakes.
Mr. Bounder:
Well, why don't you say the letter K instead of the letter C?
Mr. Smoketoomuch:
Well, you mean, pronounce "blassified" with a K?
Mr. Bounder;
Yes, absolutely!
Mr. Smoketoomuch:
Classified!
Mr. Bounder:
Good!
Mr. Smoketoomuch:
Oh, it's very good! I never thought of that before. What a silly bunt.
Love it, Valpower. And it makes my point perfectly. There is no sound that k or s couldn't handle in place of c.
I say, bring back thorn . . .
Setanta wrote:Personally, i am also opposed to "Q" and "X" . . . i feel they humiliate any right-thinking speaker of the language, and ought to be done away with . . .
What??? And make all the Scrabble games average less than 250!!
You could just use thorn, and make it quadruple word value . . .
Dear Goldmund:
"Loch" could just as easily be spelled "lokh." In fact, phonetically that would be closer to the pronunciation. And for any words that have the soft 'ch' sounds, words such as cheeze or cheers, how come English doesn't have any diacrticial marks? There should be a special letter for the 'ch' sound. And I totally agree with Setanta that the abandonment of the thorn in English useage was one of the high crimes and/or misdemeanors in English useage. Why use the awkward combination of 'th' when a representative chracter for that sound already exists?
I say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
American speling looks clunky to me. I think America should revert to the good old proper English, and the sooner the better.
So then, McT, you favor abandoning magic and music, and reverting to magick and musick?
Merry Andrew wrote:Dear Goldmund:
"Loch" could just as easily be spelled "lokh." In fact, phonetically that would be closer to the pronunciation. And for any words that have the soft 'ch' sounds, words such as cheeze or cheers, how come English doesn't have any diacrticial marks? There should be a special letter for the 'ch' sound. And I totally agree with Setanta that the abandonment of the thorn in English useage was one of the high crimes and/or misdemeanors in English useage. Why use the awkward combination of 'th' when a representative chracter for that sound already exists?
Dear Merry Andrew,
You are quite correct. I did not think of that.
Kindest regards,
Goldmund
Ts pssble t' lmt mny lttrs n stll b undrstd.
What else should go?
Joe(I want a keyboard with only ten keys.)Nation
Setanta wrote:So then, McT, you favor abandoning magic and music, and reverting to magick and musick?
If that's what it would take, I'm not averse to that. A small price to pay. "Master of the Queen's Musick" is such a grand title, don't you agree?
I think Mr Webster did his nation a great disservice when he decided to mess with the spellings. A bit similar to the time John Lennon decided to have psychedelic painting on his Rolls-Royce. Not an improvement, IMHO.
:wink:
How insulting do I have to be to get some response around here?
I do beg your pardon, Mr. McTeafortwo, i have been very remiss in not rising to your bait . . . i missed that completely. Were the Queen to show the same taste in musique as she does in her attire, i would suggest that the Master of the Queens Musik were better advised not to quit his day job.
Thorn is great, and that other voiced th letter, like a d with a line through it - all for them. What we need is MORE letters. For Scrabble, as much as anything else. I once went for a job with Chambers Dictionary, based in Glasgow, which is well known in British Scrabble-playing circles for lots of Scots and other words with high scores. Unfortunately I told them that although it was utterly pointless having so many scoticisms in the dictionary, they were on no account to drop them because of Scrabble. I didn't get that job. Which is just as well as I didn't want to live in the frozen north anyway. So there, ner.
I do believe we've had this British vs American go-round before, but I'll add my tuppence, anyhow, repetitive though it may be. My problem with Mr. Noah Webster isn't that he mangled the Queen's (or King's, at the time) English (he didn't) but that he stopped short of completing the job of much-needed revision.
Now, first, to soothe any bruised British sensibilities, I quite agree that some Americanisms are dumb. 'Kerb' makes much more phonetic sense than 'curb'. And why anyone should stick an extra 'e' into whisky is beyond me. Likewise, 'grey' is much preferable to 'gray.'
But, that said, there is absolutely no reason to have an extra 'u' in words like color, flavor, etc. unless one is speaking with a pronounced accent or in an esoteric dialect. Likewise, I see no reason to reverse the last two letters of center and theater, except to make the French happy. And, speaking of French, to spell 'check' as 'cheque' is simply absurd.
As Mammy Yokum would say, "Ah has spoken."
