Words that should be respelt

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Exactly my point. The journey that word has gone on tells a story. It tells us of the sensibilities and aspirations of those people who changed the word to \make it more latinate. By attempting to 'correct' the spellings, you take the place of the 'hypercorrectionists' you seek to displace.

I prefer to think of it as reducing the systematic child abuse that is spelling in English. It is only the English language that can have an annual competition to prove that all school students except one in a country of 300 million people will misspell at least one word - the National Spelling Bee of the USA.

One does not need to know the history of a word every time one puts that word to paper. Most people couldn't care less about that. How often in a lifetime does the average person need to know the history of a particular word? Maybe once or twice? How often do people just need to spell words? A lot more often than that. Most people don't know or care that the -gh- digraph was originally a letter called yogh (Ȝȝ) that was purged from the orthography by Norman French scribes who despised non-Latin letters. But I'm sure most people have had trouble learning the ten or so different ways that the ending -ough can be pronounced, and assigning the correct pronunciation to each unfamiliar word with that ending.

Most people won't shed a tear for lost history if "debt" lost its silent b. The history can still be found in a good dictionary if anyone wants it. Yet English-speaking children all over the world would not mind a bit if you told them that "frend" was now an acceptable alternative spelling for "friend". (Derived, btw, from OE "freond", via ME "frend" - so "frend" is actually a historically plausible spelling.)

Originally Posted by Kitsune

I don't know what you're talking about when it comes to Spanish, because I'm deep into my second semester on it and am frustrated beyond my wit's end as to how many forms there are of any given verb when compared to English. The conjugation is madness and irregular verbs/stem changers are very difficult to remember. Just like the students in my class that complain about why Spanish isn't easier, you need to realize that you can't approach a language that has been developing for thousands of years and simply request it change because you have a tough time remembering certain technical aspects of it.

I didn't say that learning Spanish would be easy. If I was learning Spanish, I would also be complaining loudly about irregular verb conjugations. (I know I did when I studied French. ) I said that spelling in Spanish is easy compared to English, once you've spent some time learning the basics. Had you heard these conjugated verbs spoken out loud, you would have had a decent chance of spelling them correctly.