[Wikipedia-l] Re: Anglicised English British English

[Mark Williamson]

Oh god... those stupid silent letters.

"Oh gee we like Latin so much!!! Let's insert a letter for no good reason."

Island, receipt, etc

On 20/09/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Jack & Naree wrote:
> > Well I don't want to live in an Americanised world; I'd rather take arms
> > against a sea of illiterate yanks, than suffer the slings and arrows of
> > their nauseating makey-uppy drawl. (and yes I do have American friends!)
> >  I know it's not going to feed the starving children in Africa, but I simply
> > can't feckin' stand seeing the word "center" and "color" and hearing people
> > raising the intonation at the end of their sentences.
> >  American-English is like a giant linguistic fingernail down the English
> > blackboard.
>
> The English upper class has been in charge of spelling standardisation
> for the best part of 400 years, and they've made an absolute hash of it.
> They inserted silent letters all over the place (e.g. island), and kept
> historical spellings so far past their use-by date as to be bizarre
> (e.g. knight). The English spelling system is a linguistic laughing
> stock. Maybe it's about time we let someone else take control.
>
> It's a pity the debate has to be so politically charged, wouldn't it be
> nice if we could judge Webster's reforms by their merits?
>
> Note that whatever it is, rising intonation is definitely not a form of
> Americanisation, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal
>
> -- Tim Starling (Australian)
>
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