Posted on 05/28/2012 9:17:40 AM PDT by Steelfish
Dude, I get your point. But I don't find it an unsurmountable challenge. I'm not one for artificially modifying the language. The French have tried it for centuries and are losing the battle.
Just study your spelling and consider it penance for being born into the blessings of the Anglosphere.
Nor I, but that is exactly what we did when we fixed the spellings of words in the 18th century, and unlike the French attempts it seems to have stuck, except for some other artificial changes (like us and the Aussies dropping some of the pointless u's from British spelling, and the odd simplification like Boro for Borough on signs.
Language is defined by its usage, so if, for instance, enough of us decided "to hell with being thought illiterate, I'm not going to spell the 'f' sound 'ph' ever again" and started writing about fotografs, filology and the like, in a generation that would be the standard spelling with the ph spellings listed as archaic in dictionaries of those latter days. (The same with punctuation and other usage: a mass movement to not put a comma in front of "which" would eventually change "correct" usage, just as enough of us applying the modal meaning of "hopefully" is eroding the prescriptivist insistence that it only means "in a hopeful manner" -- hopefully the correctness of the modal meaning will soon be universally acknowledged.)
Yes, you're right, of course [note the commas, I love 'em.] I just want to resist changes to the language until the pressure is irresistible. Too many of the changes, in my never-to-be-humble opinion, are due to a lack of education or the desire for ease at the expense of precision.
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