Re: Logographic English was Re: Divergent Scripts

Quoting Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:

> John Cowan wrote:
> >Peter Clark scripsit:
> >
> > > I can easily imagine a scenario in which students five
> > > hundred years hence are still able to read Hemingway in the "original"
> >with
> > > only glosses at the bottom of the page for obsolete words (much like
> >what we
> > > do for Shakespeare today), even though pronunciation has completely
> >changed.
> >
> >The only reason students can do that with Shakespeare is that we almost
> >completely rationalize and modernize the spelling.
>
> The Shakespeare I've seen in school, appart from the Swedish translations,
> has been packed with spellings like "deliuer", "vpon", "e're" and "dar'd".
> Are you telling me that the original spelling was way weirder? Ooga ...
It could be considerably weirder, yes.  <u> and <v>, though,
were in complementary distribution:  <v> at the beginnings of
words, <u> elsewhere.

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Thomas Wier
Dept. of Linguistics  "Nihil magis praestandum est quam ne pecorum ritu
University of Chicago sequamur antecedentium gregem, pergentes non qua
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