No but if the MAJORITY of people have trouble with the current system, then there are obviously problems. And English spellings ARE regularly revised year to year - just not consistently (note 'thru' is now in most major dictionaries as a legitimate alternative spelling - and not an addition for the better, IMO). The problem is - as you just pointed out - that there is no standard relationship between a text character (or set) and a particular phoneme. If there was only one way to spell 'ee' there would only be one way to spell 'weird' (I almost spelt it 'wierd' but my new in-line spell checker assures me it is one of those annoying dozen-odd exceptions to the i before e except after c rule).
I'm not sure what part of the world you come from, so I don't know how I should spell colour/color for you. Or the...ise/ize words. The US was - a century or so ago - very pro-reform, but have since become the most reform-reactionary nation. If you are a US citizen arguing this, I certainly hope you are also pushing for a return to 'standard' British spellings as used in all non-US countries other than possibly Canada which I'm not sure on!! (BTW: I prefer the US spellings as they ARE generally more logical).
The Simplified Spelling Society's "Cut Spelling" system removes about 90% of spelling silliness without seriously affecting legibility to 'old school' readers by standardising (since I'm not a US citizen, I'll use the British-English spelling) this sort of thing. It is one of many proposed options. Not my favorite, but probably the most realistic of all I have seen.
English spelling causes serious problems for both native and second-language users, which is a pity, because English is also an inclusive, and powerful language with a relatively clean (and improving) grammar. It is a good language for the most part. But the status-quo exclusivity club are more interested in false traditions and making it as hard as possible for others to join them on top of the language order as possible.
If you have - through hard work and good fortune to have a particular cognitive skill set conducive to being able to spell - fought your way to the top of the spelling food chain, good for you. But people who try to use that fact to lord it over those who haven't must be struggling to find any other reason to justify their sense of self-superiority.
Anyway, my problem with the post that started all this was mainly that the poster had some quite good come-backs to my post, then wrecked my respect for his/her whole argument by finishing off with a spelling cheap-shot.
If pointing out a few spelling errors is the best come back someone can give, why bother? And the poster actually had some decent responses anyway, so was it really necessary to cheapen the response like that? It's a bit like finishing a list of argument points with "and your mother is ugly." It may or may not be true, but either way it is entirely irrelevant to the argument.
And to finish off by dragging this post kicking and screaming back towards the topic (hey, *I* wasn't the one who STARTED talking about spelling;-), having a consistent relationship between characters and pronunciation would make TTS programming much simpler.
Ah, English is NOT systematically updated like French, German, Chinese to name three recent ones off the top of my head. That is the problem. Oral pronunciation in any language moves on and leaves the spelling long behind if there isn't a proactive effort to keep spellings current. In English, there is no reliable corelation between spelling and pronounciation, hence the problems the majority of people have with spelling. Yes majority. Hell, By age 8, English speakers are academically two years behind age-mates in comparable non-English-speaking countries because it takes that much longer just to be able to learn to read the system (if they ever do - that two years is an average, not a norm). Anyone trying to claim current English spelling is anything but a bad joke on the people who are expected to use it, is talking from somewhere nowhere near their mouth.
Re: Intelectual: Next time you want to complain about bloated software, remember the redundant letters you insist on.
Re: Denegrate: How many ways can you find of spelling the same short-e (or short-i if your accent is different to mine) phoneme? (Clue - you can't use your fingers as you don't have enough).
Oh, I wasn't criticising people who are proud of being able to spell English correctly - an ability to memorise insanely long lists of largely arbitary letter combinations is a memory skill to be rightly proud of (though I'm sure the same neurons could be put to better use if they didn't have to be used thuswise). Just people who think the actual SYSTEM in English is something to be proud of.
> it would also probably help to spell "intellectual" and "denigrate" correctly.
It would probably help if people didn't think slagging off others' inability to spell didn't drag their own arguments to several levels lower than the people who's spelling inability they are trying to use to distract from the argument.
Also help if peoiple joined the Simplified Spelling Society and tried to get English removed from the status of the only modern language that does not regularly have its spelling updated to reflect current verbal usage. Being proud of being able to spell English in its current written form is tantamount to being proud of ignorance (something else rather prevalent in certain parts of the English-speaking world).
1) Lots of pirated and unpatched MS Windows installs.
2) Most sysadmins are in their jobs because of who they know, not what they know (and they know nil - I taught English to a class of comp-sci under-grads last year. These comp-sci majors' total computer knowledge was punching in Java from a text book and that 'Bill Gates is very rich' - which is the only interest most of them have in computers: to get rich like Bill Gates. Set an assignment like 'hit Google and find out who Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Linus Torvolds, Richard Stallman, etc. is' and next week get blank stares of 'you wanted us to do homework? We have rich/powerful parents - we don't have to even come to class if we don't want to') I refused to assess the class as they had not done one single bit of work in six months. AFAIK, the uni passed them anyway).
3) A LOT of spam comes out of places like China, but is paid for by US sources who get corrupt ISPs here to do their dirty work. The Chinese govt's original attitude was 'it's foreign income for China and no-one will block-ban 1/3 of the world population' until the rest of the world started doing just that and now they are starting to crack down on it.
Glenalec - who's broadband connection into the Chinese Academic 'net is usually drowned under virus-chatter 8am to 2am - thank-heavens for cronjobs!
They are RIGHT NOW implementing the new infrastructure, causing multi-week-long rolling outages across large regions of the country and - so far - no sign of improved service. Viva China - at least the cost of living here is negligible.
Being blind does not automatically exclude you from being tech-literate. You would be amazed at what 'disabled' people can do in the face of narrow-sighted prejudice and stereotyping.
(Why was parent modded insightful? Since when has denegrating the intelectual capabilities of blind people [even in poor jest] been considered insightful?)
...I had to just last week debrief four classes of students on appropriate usage of profanity. They want to talk like a hollywood action flic amongst their peers, that's fine, but when you call your teacher to tell him that 'the fucking internet is friggin mother-fucked up today' it is pretty inappropriate and I was honestly shocked (and that example is NOTHING compared to how I talk to my computer when alone! - I can swear to make a US marine blush, but I don't do it when talking to my boss or where the general public has to put up with it!)
The US has to also remember that they are exporting their culture intensively to places where the people can't look out the window for a reality check and start to take what they see/hear as literal truth of what the US is like!! Just something to keep in mind.
I have no problems with non-gratuitous profanity. I couldn't read Enid Blyton(sp?) after age ten ('Oh Anne, you just be quiet'). But a lot of what I hear in the media today is just there to impress the pre-pubescent kids market. It just gets to sounding stupid.
> because they're cheap asses who don't want to spring for the MPEG4/ACC/CSS/Dolby/etc. patents.
More like their people generally can't afford to pay for all the baggage (who can?). No offence meant, I'm sure;-) and none taken around here either, but that statement is a bit like saying that I use Debian because I'm too cheap to pay for Microsoft Windows/Office/VirusShield/&c.
It's about time China started exercising it's demographic strength instead of being a passive sink of consumers for all the crap that couldn't be sold in the West.
I get paid in Chinese RMB which is fixed to $US. I had to put off converting to $AUS end of last year as I would have been loosing more than 30% of my salary in the conversion compared to the year before.
According to Carl Sagan, the cost of full-sky survey (ie, checking what/when is coming, not necessarily doing something about it) is less than the cost of one blackhawk helicopter.
That is a pretty cheap option to be ignoring.
I don't know why the military machine are not getting behind this. If they can convince congress to fund them to blow up the world umpteen times, surely an intensive earth-colision asteroid detection program would be a great opportunity to keep them in jobs and funding until a new credible 'evil empire' can be created for them to justify themselves with!
the mentioned papers were handed out for comparison, then collected back again by the lecturers. I assume they were a bit scared of a law-suit from the government for breaching their NDA or whatever they were being held under. And I won't name names as I don't want to get said lecturers in trouble either.
I left Australia to teach in China before the draft was finalised, so I don't know which version (or compromise between) ended up being used. I sincerely hope the govt. backed down on it.
Sorry to be so useless:-(
PS. Sorry for the delay getting back. They're upgrading the backbone in China ATM and we have rolling nationwide outages for days at a time this month.
then you plug the card with x86 bios/driver into your PowerPC board and it won't work. So the device is only usable for whatever architectures the manufacturer decides to support. And the OS community has even more trouble supporting the stuff themselves because the hardware specs are all hidden behind firmware!
It's a nice idea when you first look, but then you find yourself locked into one architecture forever (or at least until you are ready to throw out your cards and buy new ones along with your new-arch MOBO.
You could abstract the driver with a VM, but high-level languages are generally not considered good for drivers unless you don't mind dragging the system down to the speed of molasses on a cold day.
..."F - Copied from http://www...." on an assignment! Their idea that I can't find something on the web ten times faster than them never fails to amaze me!
Step 1) think assignment is fishy (very easy for an experienced teacher) Step 2) search for a quoted sentence from the assignment Step 3) fail assignment.
Works 9 times out of 10. Cpoies from paper sources are MUCH harder to trace. Student access to the web makes life SO much easier for teachers too!
...small to niche businesses are, per employee, orders of magnitude better for the economy than big business. Of course small businesses can't payrole a politician to support that.
For example, Australian logging companies twist the political 'job-loss' arm every time there is a threat that a forest won't be opened up for bulk-chipping. They neglect to mention that for every job they create, five were lost from the boutique timber industry (making long-term usable furnature, rather than newsprint/chip-wrapper/landfill) who loose their rights to selectively fell when the chippers move in the bulk machinery.
> So there's really no way to prevent somebody's kid from somehow managing to confuse neo-nazi websites for reliable sources while writing a paper about Hitler.
There are a whole slew of data weighing techniques that are suitable for teaching from lower primary school. They weren't being taught last time I was in the Primary Ed system (Australia, 5 years ago) but I don't know about now. Generally these things start being slipped into individual class curriculums by the conscientious teachers long before they end up in the formal syllabus.
These skills are VERY important for the correct function of democracy, so there is some pressure from modern western governments to keep them out of the schools (cite attempted modifications to Queensland's social studies curriculum circa late 1990's to stop the correction of the 'wasted vote' myth that assists the major parties in dominating elections).
I generally email mine. Then I can CC their opposition counterpart and/or the papers *if necessary* (my current federal MP takes her constituents seriously, so I don't have to take such measures ATM).
(Plus my pens don't have a spell checker [neither does my browser, as I'm sure people here have noticed - I'm waiting for KDE3.2 to hit Debian/unstable and day... week... month now];-)
This geek doesn't even own a printer. He works to and for screen almost exclusively. I get my very occasional colour printing done on the industrial lazer at the local print shop and my clightly less occasional B&W printing on a department laser.;-)
In Aust., they were selling unbelievably cheap moble phones several years back (might still be, I don't live there ATM) but you had to sign up to a rediculously expensive usage plan. Eventually the Govt. made the companies print an expected cost over 1 year of normal use on all advertising.
A similar regulation for printers might solve what is esentially the same problem in a different consumer sector.
Or we could just keep it in mind and calculate it ourselves. Are we not geeks?!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
If memory serves correctly, NZ also outlawed DVD region coding as a restrictive trade practise. Any Kiwis like to elaborate?
Unfortunately, the Aust. Govt. seems more interested in emulating what goes on NW across the Pacific! :-(
No but if the MAJORITY of people have trouble with the current system, then there are obviously problems. And English spellings ARE regularly revised year to year - just not consistently (note 'thru' is now in most major dictionaries as a legitimate alternative spelling - and not an addition for the better, IMO). The problem is - as you just pointed out - that there is no standard relationship between a text character (or set) and a particular phoneme. If there was only one way to spell 'ee' there would only be one way to spell 'weird' (I almost spelt it 'wierd' but my new in-line spell checker assures me it is one of those annoying dozen-odd exceptions to the i before e except after c rule).
...ise/ize words. The US was - a century or so ago - very pro-reform, but have since become the most reform-reactionary nation. If you are a US citizen arguing this, I certainly hope you are also pushing for a return to 'standard' British spellings as used in all non-US countries other than possibly Canada which I'm not sure on!! (BTW: I prefer the US spellings as they ARE generally more logical).
;-), having a consistent relationship between characters and pronunciation would make TTS programming much simpler.
I'm not sure what part of the world you come from, so I don't know how I should spell colour/color for you. Or the
The Simplified Spelling Society's "Cut Spelling" system removes about 90% of spelling silliness without seriously affecting legibility to 'old school' readers by standardising (since I'm not a US citizen, I'll use the British-English spelling) this sort of thing. It is one of many proposed options. Not my favorite, but probably the most realistic of all I have seen.
English spelling causes serious problems for both native and second-language users, which is a pity, because English is also an inclusive, and powerful language with a relatively clean (and improving) grammar. It is a good language for the most part. But the status-quo exclusivity club are more interested in false traditions and making it as hard as possible for others to join them on top of the language order as possible.
If you have - through hard work and good fortune to have a particular cognitive skill set conducive to being able to spell - fought your way to the top of the spelling food chain, good for you. But people who try to use that fact to lord it over those who haven't must be struggling to find any other reason to justify their sense of self-superiority.
Anyway, my problem with the post that started all this was mainly that the poster had some quite good come-backs to my post, then wrecked my respect for his/her whole argument by finishing off with a spelling cheap-shot.
If pointing out a few spelling errors is the best come back someone can give, why bother? And the poster actually had some decent responses anyway, so was it really necessary to cheapen the response like that? It's a bit like finishing a list of argument points with "and your mother is ugly." It may or may not be true, but either way it is entirely irrelevant to the argument.
And to finish off by dragging this post kicking and screaming back towards the topic (hey, *I* wasn't the one who STARTED talking about spelling
Ah, English is NOT systematically updated like French, German, Chinese to name three recent ones off the top of my head. That is the problem. Oral pronunciation in any language moves on and leaves the spelling long behind if there isn't a proactive effort to keep spellings current. In English, there is no reliable corelation between spelling and pronounciation, hence the problems the majority of people have with spelling. Yes majority. Hell, By age 8, English speakers are academically two years behind age-mates in comparable non-English-speaking countries because it takes that much longer just to be able to learn to read the system (if they ever do - that two years is an average, not a norm). Anyone trying to claim current English spelling is anything but a bad joke on the people who are expected to use it, is talking from somewhere nowhere near their mouth.
Re: Intelectual: Next time you want to complain about bloated software, remember the redundant letters you insist on.
Re: Denegrate: How many ways can you find of spelling the same short-e (or short-i if your accent is different to mine) phoneme? (Clue - you can't use your fingers as you don't have enough).
Oh, I wasn't criticising people who are proud of being able to spell English correctly - an ability to memorise insanely long lists of largely arbitary letter combinations is a memory skill to be rightly proud of (though I'm sure the same neurons could be put to better use if they didn't have to be used thuswise). Just people who think the actual SYSTEM in English is something to be proud of.
> it would also probably help to spell "intellectual" and "denigrate" correctly.
It would probably help if people didn't think slagging off others' inability to spell didn't drag their own arguments to several levels lower than the people who's spelling inability they are trying to use to distract from the argument.
Also help if peoiple joined the Simplified Spelling Society and tried to get English removed from the status of the only modern language that does not regularly have its spelling updated to reflect current verbal usage. Being proud of being able to spell English in its current written form is tantamount to being proud of ignorance (something else rather prevalent in certain parts of the English-speaking world).
Finally, see my Bio.
A number of points:
1) Lots of pirated and unpatched MS Windows installs.
2) Most sysadmins are in their jobs because of who they know, not what they know (and they know nil - I taught English to a class of comp-sci under-grads last year. These comp-sci majors' total computer knowledge was punching in Java from a text book and that 'Bill Gates is very rich' - which is the only interest most of them have in computers: to get rich like Bill Gates. Set an assignment like 'hit Google and find out who Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Linus Torvolds, Richard Stallman, etc. is' and next week get blank stares of 'you wanted us to do homework? We have rich/powerful parents - we don't have to even come to class if we don't want to') I refused to assess the class as they had not done one single bit of work in six months. AFAIK, the uni passed them anyway).
3) A LOT of spam comes out of places like China, but is paid for by US sources who get corrupt ISPs here to do their dirty work. The Chinese govt's original attitude was 'it's foreign income for China and no-one will block-ban 1/3 of the world population' until the rest of the world started doing just that and now they are starting to crack down on it.
Glenalec - who's broadband connection into the Chinese Academic 'net is usually drowned under virus-chatter 8am to 2am - thank-heavens for cronjobs!
They are RIGHT NOW implementing the new infrastructure, causing multi-week-long rolling outages across large regions of the country and - so far - no sign of improved service. Viva China - at least the cost of living here is negligible.
Being blind does not automatically exclude you from being tech-literate. You would be amazed at what 'disabled' people can do in the face of narrow-sighted prejudice and stereotyping.
(Why was parent modded insightful? Since when has denegrating the intelectual capabilities of blind people [even in poor jest] been considered insightful?)
...I had to just last week debrief four classes of students on appropriate usage of profanity. They want to talk like a hollywood action flic amongst their peers, that's fine, but when you call your teacher to tell him that 'the fucking internet is friggin mother-fucked up today' it is pretty inappropriate and I was honestly shocked (and that example is NOTHING compared to how I talk to my computer when alone! - I can swear to make a US marine blush, but I don't do it when talking to my boss or where the general public has to put up with it!)
The US has to also remember that they are exporting their culture intensively to places where the people can't look out the window for a reality check and start to take what they see/hear as literal truth of what the US is like!! Just something to keep in mind.
I have no problems with non-gratuitous profanity. I couldn't read Enid Blyton(sp?) after age ten ('Oh Anne, you just be quiet'). But a lot of what I hear in the media today is just there to impress the pre-pubescent kids market. It just gets to sounding stupid.
> because they're cheap asses who don't want to spring for the MPEG4/ACC/CSS/Dolby/etc. patents.
;-) and none taken around here either, but that statement is a bit like saying that I use Debian because I'm too cheap to pay for Microsoft Windows/Office/VirusShield/&c.
More like their people generally can't afford to pay for all the baggage (who can?). No offence meant, I'm sure
It's about time China started exercising it's demographic strength instead of being a passive sink of consumers for all the crap that couldn't be sold in the West.
Compared to what it usually is. Yes: RIGHT!!
I get paid in Chinese RMB which is fixed to $US. I had to put off converting to $AUS end of last year as I would have been loosing more than 30% of my salary in the conversion compared to the year before.
Method of alerting pedestrians to the approach of a silenced automobile.
Basicly, an ice-cream van bell-pianola attached to the fan belt.
Ding Ding Dingty Ding....
I want this in my classes too.
(I'm the teacher.)
According to Carl Sagan, the cost of full-sky survey (ie, checking what/when is coming, not necessarily doing something about it) is less than the cost of one blackhawk helicopter.
That is a pretty cheap option to be ignoring.
I don't know why the military machine are not getting behind this. If they can convince congress to fund them to blow up the world umpteen times, surely an intensive earth-colision asteroid detection program would be a great opportunity to keep them in jobs and funding until a new credible 'evil empire' can be created for them to justify themselves with!
the mentioned papers were handed out for comparison, then collected back again by the lecturers. I assume they were a bit scared of a law-suit from the government for breaching their NDA or whatever they were being held under. And I won't name names as I don't want to get said lecturers in trouble either.
:-(
I left Australia to teach in China before the draft was finalised, so I don't know which version (or compromise between) ended up being used. I sincerely hope the govt. backed down on it.
Sorry to be so useless
PS. Sorry for the delay getting back. They're upgrading the backbone in China ATM and we have rolling nationwide outages for days at a time this month.
then you plug the card with x86 bios/driver into your PowerPC board and it won't work. So the device is only usable for whatever architectures the manufacturer decides to support. And the OS community has even more trouble supporting the stuff themselves because the hardware specs are all hidden behind firmware!
It's a nice idea when you first look, but then you find yourself locked into one architecture forever (or at least until you are ready to throw out your cards and buy new ones along with your new-arch MOBO.
You could abstract the driver with a VM, but high-level languages are generally not considered good for drivers unless you don't mind dragging the system down to the speed of molasses on a cold day.
Have YOU ever tried pressing flowers between two URLs?
..."F - Copied from http://www...." on an assignment! Their idea that I can't find something on the web ten times faster than them never fails to amaze me!
Step 1) think assignment is fishy (very easy for an experienced teacher)
Step 2) search for a quoted sentence from the assignment
Step 3) fail assignment.
Works 9 times out of 10. Cpoies from paper sources are MUCH harder to trace. Student access to the web makes life SO much easier for teachers too!
...small to niche businesses are, per employee, orders of magnitude better for the economy than big business. Of course small businesses can't payrole a politician to support that.
For example, Australian logging companies twist the political 'job-loss' arm every time there is a threat that a forest won't be opened up for bulk-chipping. They neglect to mention that for every job they create, five were lost from the boutique timber industry (making long-term usable furnature, rather than newsprint/chip-wrapper/landfill) who loose their rights to selectively fell when the chippers move in the bulk machinery.
> So there's really no way to prevent somebody's kid from somehow managing to confuse neo-nazi websites for reliable sources while writing a paper about Hitler.
There are a whole slew of data weighing techniques that are suitable for teaching from lower primary school. They weren't being taught last time I was in the Primary Ed system (Australia, 5 years ago) but I don't know about now. Generally these things start being slipped into individual class curriculums by the conscientious teachers long before they end up in the formal syllabus.
These skills are VERY important for the correct function of democracy, so there is some pressure from modern western governments to keep them out of the schools (cite attempted modifications to Queensland's social studies curriculum circa late 1990's to stop the correction of the 'wasted vote' myth that assists the major parties in dominating elections).
I generally email mine. Then I can CC their opposition counterpart and/or the papers *if necessary* (my current federal MP takes her constituents seriously, so I don't have to take such measures ATM).
;-)
(Plus my pens don't have a spell checker [neither does my browser, as I'm sure people here have noticed - I'm waiting for KDE3.2 to hit Debian/unstable and day... week... month now]
Afraid I'll stick you on my foes list and mod you off my version of the board, eh? Do me a favor and foe me off your life horizon. Please!
of what we post than impresing those who have nothing constructive of their own to contribute and resent others who may have.
This geek doesn't even own a printer. He works to and for screen almost exclusively. I get my very occasional colour printing done on the industrial lazer at the local print shop and my clightly less occasional B&W printing on a department laser. ;-)
as other posters have mentioned.
;-)
In Aust., they were selling unbelievably cheap moble phones several years back (might still be, I don't live there ATM) but you had to sign up to a rediculously expensive usage plan. Eventually the Govt. made the companies print an expected cost over 1 year of normal use on all advertising.
A similar regulation for printers might solve what is esentially the same problem in a different consumer sector.
Or we could just keep it in mind and calculate it ourselves. Are we not geeks?!
Perth was - according to a Perthite I uesd to work with - the only colony to refuse to have convicts dumped on them.
;-)
Also is the most remote capitol in the world, apparently, so you certainly have a point