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I never want to see Glyn correct spelling again

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  • I never want to see Glyn correct spelling again

    Not when news like this comes from his country. You know the one that cannot spell color or pronounce aluminum :)

    Spelling "truely atrosious," says academic

    By Luke BakerThu Aug 7, 11:29 AM ET

    Embaressed by yor spelling? Never you mind.

    Fed up with his students' complete inability to spell common English correctly, a British academic has suggested it may be time to accept "variant spellings" as legitimate.

    Rather than grammarians getting in a huff about "argument" being spelled "arguement" or "opportunity" as "opertunity," why not accept anything that's phonetically (fonetickly anyone?) correct as long as it can be understood?

    "Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea," Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

    "University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell."


    To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including "ignor," "occured," "thier," "truely," "speach" and "twelth" (it should be "twelfth").

    Then of course there are words like "misspelt" (often spelled "mispelt"), not to mention "varient," a commonly used variant of "variant."

    And that doesn't even begin to delve into all the problems English people have with words that use the letters "i" and "e" together, like weird, seize, leisure, foreign and neighbor.

    The rhyme "i before e except after c" may be on the lips of every schoolchild in Britain, but that doesn't mean they remember the rule by the time they get to university.

    Of course, such proposals have been made in the past. The advent of text messaging turned many students into spelling neanderthals as phrases such as "wot r u doin 2nite?" became socially, if not academically, acceptable.

    Despite Smith's suggestion, language mavens are unconvinced. John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, says rules are rules and they are there for good reason.

    "There are enormous advantages in having a coherent system of spelling," he told the Times newspaper.

    "It makes it easier to communicate. Maybe during a learning phase there is some scope for error, but I would hope that by the time people get to university they have learnt to spell."

    Yet even some of Britain's greatest wordsmiths have acknowledged it's a language with irritating quirkiness.

    Playwright George Bernard Shaw was fond of pointing out that the word "ghoti" could just as well be pronounced "fish" if you followed common pronunciation: 'gh' as in "tough," 'o' as in "women" and 'ti' as in "nation."

    And he was a playright.

  • #2
    LOL...

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    • #3
      Who needs rules these days?
      Why bother to go to school (skool) in the first place?
      Language rules are boring to some, but if they are ignored the consequencies are most serious. Great heavens, the Brits could end up sounding like Americans, and that would never do.
      Semper in excretum. Solum profunda variat.

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      • #4
        all languages ivolv.
        Chaucer would have been aghast at Shakespeare´s language and he in turn would have been depressed after reading E.A.Poe :)
        If i only was so smart yesterday as my wife is today

        Minding your own biz is great virtue, but situation awareness saves lives - Dok

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        • #5
          Why not just start letting students make up their own language?

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          • #6
            Originally posted by jame$thegreat View Post
            Why not just start letting students make up their own language?
            they already did, pig latin
            "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" B. Franklin

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            • #7
              Originally posted by braindead View Post
              all languages ivolv.
              Chaucer would have been aghast at Shakespeare´s language and he in turn would have been depressed after reading E.A.Poe :)
              Well observed, and good points, braindead, :) but the important element is time. Things take time to evolve properly. Corruption of the language by the ignorant and lazy is to be resisted. What is the point of saying 'could of' instead of 'could have'? It doesn't make sense. These inferiors don't like the rules of language? Tough luck. See how far they get when they ignore rules in maths, physics, chemistry, or anything else.
              Semper in excretum. Solum profunda variat.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by jame$thegreat View Post
                Why not just start letting students make up their own language?
                ebonics
                "Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

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