[Editors -- I started using and to bracket italics, but this is an editing of e-mail previous written, which naturally used underscores for such emphasis, so I left those in. Sorry for the inconsistency. The slashes are standard slashes, to delimite phonemes.] MIND STALK D. R. Sullivan An Essay on the Orthography of the English Language as an Example of Spontaneous Order The writing system of the English language is often denounced for its inconsistencies and complexities, particularly the lack of a direct connection between spelling and pronunciation. Some complexity I acknowledge, but I wish to present the beginnings of an argument that our orthography has evolved into a fairly robust and rational solution for a problem other than exactly representing pronunciation. First case: the "silent 'e'" isn't. Most of you should know this already, but I'll go through it anyway. Although final 'e's aren't pronounced as such they do lengthen preceding vowels, a rather necessary task as we have 5 vowel symbols and 13 simple vowel sounds, although that includes the schwa which is sort of defined as the vowel English doesn't care about. Still, even the long/short dichotomy taught in grammar school (inadequate -- can you come up with 3 values for 'a'? But then they still impose Latin syntax on our language.) gives ten sounds, five which our alphabet doesn't include. ton/tone, run/rune. 'done' might seem an exception, with the save value as 'ton', but then try pronouncing 'don'. The vowel is still lengthened. Of course I would pronounce 'con' like 'don' but 'cone' like 'tone' -- the vowel is _still_ lengthened, but inconsistently somewhere. Second case: some dialects drop 'r' or 'h' in many places. Should their writing conform to their pronunciation? I think most would agree that that would confuse them and us. Asking for spelling to reflect phonetic pronunciation raises the question of whose pronunciation will be represented. The problem isn't that orthography doesn't match phonology but that phonology doesn't match phonology -- that's what it means to have dialects. _Except_, that the differences between dialects often follow patterns -- consistent shifts of vowels, dropping terminal 'r', or whatnot. Rather than having our writing pinned to one privileged/standard dialect (simple solution) we've evolved an orthography representing an abstract phonology from which an actual phonetic pronunciation can be _predicted_ using the rules of the dialect -- rules often similar in form to other dialects, but with different values. Not that there still aren't irregularities, but part of English's complexity is in fact solving a problem most people don't realize exists. A rather 'fair' solution, too. Thus we get the benefit of some relation between spelling and pronunciation, using variable rules for variable dialects, while having the same written language be a bridge between different dialects, unlike Chinese which uses an arbitrary set of ideograms, one for each word. And then much of the remaining irregularity is not random, but encodes historical information, which may well be subject to more rules. Our French, Greek, and Italian imports are the biggies here. 'philosopher' could be 'filosofer', but that would lose the handy etymological crutch -- particularly considering how much of English's classical constructions get adopted by other languages, e.g. I think the Japanese and Russian words for a telephone are more or less 'telephone'. And conversely, knowing that 'philosopher' is Greek in origin helps transcribe the /f/ sound properly. Similarly, one could gripe about having to memorize the odd spelling of /shato/ (actually, I want to pronounce that with a long /a/, whoops) 'chateau', and ask for it to be spelled 'shato', or one could remember that French /sh/ is 'ch', /o/ is 'eau', and that the word is French, thus spelling it with ease, except for the terminal 'x' of 'Bordeaux', whose justification I am unfamiliar with. Again, there are still flaws, but most of what is considered an insanely flawed structure is in fact quite powerful and useful for dealing with a multi-dialect and history-rich language. Which becomes all the more impressive when one considers that not a jot of intelligence was ever applied to the overall design, except perhaps by multiple typesetters in Elizabethan England and Noah Webster. So much for the perils of anarchy. [New section. Could I please have a list?] On Drugs and Language Doublespeak is here! "human remains pouches" for body bags. "collateral damage" for civilian casualties. "freedom fighters" for terrorists we like. "terrorists" for guerillas we don't like. "downsizing" for mass layoffs. "mass layoffs" for mass firings. "war on drugs" for Prohibition. Could someone who believes that illegal drugs should stay illegal please explain what difference there is between the modern 'war on drugs' and 1930's Prohibition, besides the chemicals banned? If there is no difference, then I think it incumbent upon the prohibitors to explain why they think the current instance of Prohibition should be less spectacularly unsuccessful than the first. I suspect the answer will be "yes, the only difference is in the drugs, but these are really bad drugs." Which won't address the question of why we should expect Prohibition to succeed this time -- arguably the more addictive the drug, the harder it is to eradicate, and why are there drugs in prisons? -- and invites discussion of the effects of the drugs themselves. Illegality is a fairly recent phenomenon; were drugs made illegal to save society from an epidemic of abuse at the time? We seem to have survived a long time without worrying about the question. Guerrilas in the Mist Actually while my list above was accurate in usage, it reflected a common confusion of concepts. 'Guerilla' is best applied to unconventional militaries, employing 'hit and fade' attacks; 'terrorist' to attempts to induce random terror in a population. The two are independent terms. An established government can be quite terrorist in practice, and a guerilla movement with well-defined targets (and good aim) need not induce widespread terror. But bombing an enemy capital with an air force is normal warfare, while systematically shooting only legislators would probably be called terrorism. (Credit to an _Economist_ article for ideas.)