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Hackers, Spelling, and Grammar?
Strom Carlson asks: "Over the last few years, I've noticed that a surprisingly large number of native English speakers, who are otherwise very technically competent, seem to lack strong English skills. Mostly, this seems to manifest itself as varying degrees of poor spelling and grammar: 'definately' instead of 'definitely'; 'should of' instead of 'should have'; and I even see the names of products and companies misspelled from time to time. It baffles me that a culture so obsessed with technical knowledge and accuracy can demonstrate such little attention to detail when it comes to communicating that knowledge with others, and it baffles me even more that many people become enraged when you attempt to help them correct and learn from their mistakes. Do hackers and geeks just not care about communicating effectively? Do they not realize that a mediocre command of written English makes them appear less intelligent? Am I missing something here?"
Actually, you are wrong.
"should of" is not the common usage.
"should've" is the common usage - which is a contraction of "should have"
However, some people, having only heard "should've" and mis-heard it as "should of", think that "should of" is the common usage.
www.eFax.com are spammers
(i.e. A report for work)
;-) (Sorry to pick on you.)
e g.html, or http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/abbreviations/f /ievseg.htm. (Note the use of "e.g." for "for example.")
Here's another thing that bothers me about common usage.
The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."
Repeat after me:
The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."
The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."
The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."
The abbreviation to use if you mean "for example" is "e.g.". The abbreviation "i.e." stands for (the Latin of) "that is."
I.e., "i.e." is used when you are rephrasing, clarifying, etc. what was already said. The sentence "i.e. A report for work", if taken literally, means that the only documents that matter to you are reports for work.
For more information, see, e.g., http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/8707/52862, http://www.planetoid.org/grammar_for_geeks/ie_vs_
(Sorry, I go on this rant periodically. Don't take it personally.)
Oh, and Russian language is in fact regulated, by the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The parent is Mark Twain's proposal for the improvement of english spelling. Link
No, the spelling is NOT arbitrary. I don't know how many times I have to point this out in my life as a linguist. An arbitrary system is one like Japanese kanji, which have no phonetic component whatsoever. The fact that I can throw a word at you that you've never seen, like, for example, "orthography," and you can read it and pronounce it correctly is proof positive of this. The fact that the spoken==>written relationship is not as strong, however, is not proof of arbitrariness. It indicates something else--something people have already discussed here without realizing it (in discussions of the multitudinous influences on the development of English), and that is the concept of morphology.
/g/ followed by an /I/. The sound no longer exists in English.
Words usually do not exist all by themselves but are members of a "word family" (and yes that is the technical term). Word families are made up of forms of the same word which feature little to no extra learning burden to master given knowledge of one of the other forms. These relationships are best represented by fixed spelling of the morphemes, even when there are pronunciation differences.
Something like Japanese (kanji, not the hiragana and katakana syllabaries) or Chinese puts all their eggs in the morphology basket, and none in the phonetic. Words are comprised of morphemes which are represented by particular graphemes (kanji/hanzi). This is great once you learn all the morpheme/grapheme pairs, but at 15,000 for Chinese, the system requires a large initial investment of time and cognitive burden.
English splits the difference between a morpheme-centric and phonetic orthographic system, wherein spellings of morphemes are relatively regular, but they are also phonetic enough that anyone with a basic understanding of the phoneme-grapheme pairings of the English use of the Roman alphabet can at least make an excellent guess at the pronunciation.
And to the many lazy and weak-minded individuals who whine about how everything should be phonetic, I would like to point out that there is an entire alphabet designed for this: the International Phonetic Alphabet. Learn this and try reading some text in it. See if it's really easier. A morpheme-centered orthographic system allows for faster processing of text because it allows the reader to bypass the sound production phase entirely, linking written words directly to their meanings (resident in the brain).
So stop whining, whiners, and learn the system. It's just a system to aid in the transfer of information. It's there to help you, not keep you down, man.
And BTW, although Noah Webster gave birth to the modern science of lexicography, dictionaries did indeed exist before his tome. They were used as spelling lists, mostly. The phase in which the English didn't care about spelling to which you are referring was up to the introduction of the printing press. Once more reading material was available to the masses it was very rightly decided that spelling should be standardized throughout the industry (he wrote with the arguably NON-standard, American spelling of "standardised). Furthermore, the "gh" that's left over in many words, including "knight" was a voiced velar fricative, not a
This article (PDF) suggests that the genitive ending was -es in Old English, and -ies or -ys in Middle English, and that the apostrophe was introduced as a replacement for omitted vowels.
However, he also describes an alternative view: that the apostrophe was originally used because of the mistaken assumption that the genitive ending was already a contraction of "his". Apparently even Shakespeare made this mistake...