It's driving me crazy
Peter Taggart (Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:18:27 PST)
I would pronounce "gray" slightly differently to "grey". The "a" would have
a shorter sound.
If one reads a little Chaucer or even Middle English, out loud, pronounced,
the strange spellings of modern (UK) English suddenly start to make sense.
The English language has got increasingly standardised since the second
world war, as communications have increased across large distances. Twenty
or thirty years ago, in Britain, one might write "hello", "hallo",
"halloa", "hullo" or "hulloa". Even my spell check recognises three of
these. (It is set to USA English which I havn't learned to change).
This standardisation makes computer searches much simpler, but even as
spelling is becoming standardised, (despite my frequent mistakes,) the
trend is to ........ destroy grammar. [Sorry, even if it is now accepted, I
can't bring myself to put an adjective in there.]
Peter (UK)
On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 5:18 PM, Jim McKenney <jamesamckenney@verizon.net>wrote:
Was
"gray" one of Noah Webster's orthographic innovations? The huge
disparity between the pronunciation of English and the spelling of English
makes our language a very difficult one to learn. Almost seventy years
have not
been enough for me to truly master English spelling. Yet most educated
people
seem to strenuously resist spelling reform (i.e. change to spelling which
reflects the pronunciation of words). I think I'm one of them: spelling
tells
us so much about the history of words. Folk etymology aside, it's a
worthwhile
and gratifying lifetime pursuit for me.