Re: If you were inventing CoBOL...
From: Chuck Stevens (charles.stevens_at_unisys.com)
Date: 09/20/04
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Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 13:26:46 -0700
Actually, I think it'd be rather easier; German has *very* few spelling
irregularities. There aren't all that many languages in which *spelling*
requires as much effort as in modern English. One of the problems is that
English spelling became fixed around the same time as the Great Vowel Shift
that marked the transition from Middle to Modern English. The conservative
Middle English spelling was retained and preferred even when the
pronunciation changed almost to the point of unrecognizability.
-Chuck Stevens
In most languages that use some sort of alphabet, the spelling reflects the
phonemes pretty closely; in English, the spellings most often reflect the
phonemes as they existed in one of the Anglo-Saxon dialects, or French, or
Norse a number of centuries ago. The pronunciation changed (most notably
the Great English Vowel Shift described by the Brothers Grimm, yes, *those*
Brothers Grimm), the spelling, however, didn't.
-Chuck Stevens
"Howard Brazee" <howard@brazee.net> wrote in message
news:cin505$cih$1@peabody.colorado.edu...
>
> On 20-Sep-2004, "Chuck Stevens" <charles.stevens@unisys.com> wrote:
>
> > I agree. See the "Language and Literature" section of the Encarta
article
> > on Inuit at http://encarta.msn.com/ . In many cases the distinction
> > between a "word" and a "sentence" in that language disappears.
>
> I wonder how they write spell checkers in, say German. It would be hard
to
> parse out all of the compound words to determine if they were spelled
correctly.
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