[ScudEast]

An interesting fact about p and f that I learnt by reading a Steven J Gould book.

Grimms' Law (the same Grimms who collected the fairy tales) says that Latin "p"s become "f"s in Germanic languages (from which English is largely derived). For example "piscis" becomes "fish", "plenum" becomes "full", pes becomes "foot".

Maybe these "ph"s are a missing link in this evolutionary process and need to be weeded out as the nasty little throwbacks they are.

Or maybe they are part of the history of our language which itself contains part of the "soul" or concious perspective that Ayn Rand was talking about and removing them removes part of their meaning.

[MineralMan]

"Or maybe they are part of the history of our language which itself contains part of the "soul" or concious perspective that Ayn Rand was talking about and removing them removes part of their meaning."

Bingo! The English language is a wonderful composite of all the languages that preceded it. In our written language, one can easily see the links to those other languages, which enriches our understanding.

We kill a pig, then eat pork. In doing so, we use two very different language origins to describe the animal and the meat from that animal. We may not think about that often, but it's great fun when we do.

Cow or Ox becomes beef. We refer to our livestock using words of anglo-saxon origin, then refer to dining on that livestock using words of french origin. How instructive that is to us, relating back almost 1000 years to let us know that our anglo-saxon forbears raised the animals as farmers, while the rich feasted on the meat, preferring the french words.

The reductionism proposed by these Randian neo-linguists is just silly. It will not succeed this time any more than it has succeeded in earlier attempts to revise English orthography.

Anti-intellectualism becomes pseudo-intellectualism. Feh!