Seeking schematics/plans for decimal to binary (microswitch/relay) selector/controller

re

nto

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Language reflects the way people use it - we automatically let language reflect that, since our use of words is entirely driven by our urge to say what we mean in such a way that other people will understand what we mean.

Organisations that attempt to reform or purify languages are effective as King Canute was when he told the tide to stop rising.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

example.net:

h,

ll

at

y.

People do understand words which are spelt unconventionally, but they do understand them somewhat more slowly than they understand them when spelt conventionally, and they do tend to regard unconventional spellings as wrong, and as evidence that the author is either stupid or poorly educated.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

are

into

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Sadly, any attempt to impose a "standard" language is doomed to fail - humans are perfefctly capable of inventing their own languages if they aren't satisfied with the one they've got.

Adults invent pidgins, which do tend to be crude and inadequate, but children invent creoles, which are complete languages.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote in news:bcf5961a-e7ed-40c8-ae06- snipped-for-privacy@i12g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

Trehe are cnncvioing dtisnmatreoons taht wtnirig lkie tihs lavees the sntenece prfteecly inelibligtle. :) Perhaps the spellings that give most trouble are those with unexpected start and end letters. I also suspect that as the maximum human capacity for instant grouping (unless you're a Beduoin herder) tends to be around 7 items per group, that words longer than 7 letters might also be troublesome.

I'm a great fan of King Canute. He found his courtiers' demands so intractably silly that he set up that little act to show them how daft they were. History shows that HE was stupid, but is that history, or a later revision of it by a majority who couldn't admit to themselves that they'd been shown up by a smartarse? :)

Oddly enough, the differences in the spoken language on either side of the pond are smaller than the regional differences between the North and South of England - I've never had any trouble understanding what an American speaker had to say, while I have found people speaking Scouse - the dialect of Newcastle-on-Tyne - rather difficult to follow. All languages have regional differences but as long as the speakers find one another mutually comprehensible it's still one language - though the linguist's rule of thumb, that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy is nicely illustrated by the distinction between Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.

Norway became independent of Sweden in 1905

Paradoxically, while Dutch is officially a single language spoken both in the Netherlands and the Fleming provinces of Belgium, in Belgian progams shown on Dutch TV, the Flemish Dutch is usually under-titled to help the Dutch understand the Fleming pronunciations.

Australian English does have its own dictionary, the Macquarie dictionary of Australian English

It doesn't go in for spelling reform, though it does differe from the OED in listing "realise" as the more common spelling of the word "realize".

It is scarcely a simplication to end up with half the world using "colour" and the other half "color".

n.

Spelling is a mechanism for representing the spoken language as text - it has no perceptible effect on the subtleties of the spoken language. People have looked for such effects and they don't seem to exist.

The point being that you can invent a hypothetical time-saving to justify Noah Webster's meddling? Americans don't - in fact - type better or faster than English speakers who use the OED spellings. Copy-typing is an obsolete skill and everybody else types at a rate that is determined by the speed at which they can think up the text, where a letter here or there doesn't make any difference at all.

And where does that mention new words? If Noah Webster had confined himself creating a dictionary which included words and word usages peculiar to the U.S.A. nobody would have had anything to object to. I was objecting to his amateurish and half-baked efforts at spelling reform.

It is useful to have deprecated and archaic words in a dictionary - precisely because they are no long in common use, people find it necessary to consult a dictionary when they run into them in old texts.

Arbitrary and half-baked spelling reform is the last thing you want in your dictionary - precisely because it makes it more difficult to deal with old or foreign text.

That doesn't make him a charlatan. A charlatan intends to deceive.

My claim was that Noah Webster became a spelling reformer by immortalising his own spelling mistakes, and opted to persist with them when he realised that they were mistakes, on the basis that as they were American mistakes. an American Nationalist had a duty to use them to squeeze out British publishers from his American market. A self-serving stance, but one that he got away with.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

ts

er,

act

You are in no position to complain about inappropriate responses from other people.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Oops. Sorry - you are quite right. It's along time since I've heard either.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Where else would an antique prefer to be?

-- Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to prove it. Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell Central Florida

Like every antique, I'd prefer to be less antique, but that isn't an availablle option.

John Field's problem is that he doesn't appreciate that written language is conservative because it provides access to an enormous mass of historical documents. Why should he - he clearly never reads any of them.

The Chinese are perhaps the most extreme case. The written language is used to represent a number of mutually unintelligible spoken languages, and doesn't do the job all that well

The ideographic characters are difficult to learn and people tend to forget characters that they don't see too often - alphabetic - phoneme- based - writing systems are much easier to acqure and easier to retain, but the Chinese can't throw out their rotten writing system without losing access to their historical documents.

Noah Webster's spelling reforms - such as they were - didn't help anybody enough so you'd notice, and marginally impaired American access to the body of English language documents.

John Fields claims that eliminating the redundant "u" in "colour"and similar words makes an appreciable and worthwhile to the speed with which you can type, but I'm sure that he doesn't use a Dvorak keyboard, which would make a much larger difference.

The fact that it has never become popular, illustrates the fact that typing speed as such isn't particularly important.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen