Spelling is ruining the English language

[Shawnee123]

It seems K's point is that correct spelling is prohibitive to communication.

Have you tried reading K's posts? I can't understand a freaking word.

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

It seems K's point is that correct spelling is prohibitive to communication.

Not true for the most part. We can muddle along most of the time. However, in some cases it is easy to demonstrate that the current standard spellings are not optimum and we would be better off with some revision to standard spellings.

I remember a story a little while ago about a Canadian newsreader working for a US television network who pronounced "lieutenant" the British way (as if it was spelt "leftenant"). However, his employers wanted him to pronounce it according to the American pronunciation (he was working for a US network). To do that, they had to eschew the correct spelling on the autocues and instead use the spelling "lootenant".

This need to depart from correct spelling in this way wouldn't be necessary if the two pronunciations had two spellings to go with them. There are precedents for this in English orthography, see: aluminium/aluminum.

For some words, it is possible for them to be spoken but not transcribed without loss of meaning. Example: If one mentioned "axes" in face to face conversation, the listener would know immediately whether "axes" was the plural of "ax" or "axis", but the reader won't know unless context was supplied. Maybe 30 words cannot be disambiguated readily because both meanings are nouns or both verbs.

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

Have you tried reading K's posts? I can't understand a freaking word.

That's not my problem.