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From: karl@haddock.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Change the software or the alphabet?
Message-ID: <1575@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: Mon, 2-Nov-87 13:29:00 EST
Article-I.D.: haddock.1575
Posted: Mon Nov  2 13:29:00 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Nov-87 19:58:51 EST
References: <1446@haddock.ISC.COM> <365@zuring.cwi.nl> <1924@kuukkeli.tut.fi>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com.UUCP (Karl Heuer)
Followup-To: sci.lang
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 25
Xref: utgpu comp.std.internat:299 sci.lang:1539
Summary: Let's look at English

In article <1924@kuukkeli.tut.fi> hmj@kuukkeli.UUCP (Hannu-Matti J{rvinen) writes:
>Is this a joke or are you really stupid enough to be serious?

Neither.  Please note that I did not make any specific proposals for changing
any alphabet.  My article can be summarized as "alphabets are not immutable";
it was a rebuttal to previous articles which seemed to implicitly assume the
opposite.

To forestall accusations of American chauvinism, let me concentrate on English
(which my article also mentioned).  English words include two non-letters, 
hyphen ("-") and apostrophe ("'").  Let's look at the latter.

It's been several years since I've seen the word "Halloween" spelled with an
apostrophe.  Many traffic lights say "DONT WALK".  So many people confuse
"its" and "it's" that they might as well be alternate spellings of each other.

Given the above, and the collation problem caused by apostrophe, I would
consider it possible (not necessarily desirable) that American English may
soon drop the use of apostrophe, at least in some contexts.  This would create
some collisions; I would guess that the existing words "cant" and "wont" (but
not "shell") would probably be dropped from the language, just as "quean"
disappeared after the Great Vowel Shift made it a homonym for "queen".

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint
Followups to sci.lang only.