Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: sexist language
Message-ID: <728@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 23 Nov 88 06:18:54 GMT
References: <17618@adm.BRL.MIL>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 20

In article <17618@adm.BRL.MIL> rbj@nav.icst.nbs.gov (Root Boy Jim) writes:
>Besides, we have words for lotsa nice stuff too. And it's not fineness
>of meaning or MAXWORDS that excite me. It's the shedding of excess
>baggage: gender, (most) conjugation, diacritical marks, and the

The diaresis is a useful diacritical mark which English retains;
I have long been irritated that I can't type it.  The Macintosh, and
ISO 8859/1 are most welcome.

>In return we give up fonetik pronunciation, but I would argue for doing
>violence in that arena to rid the language some of the more rediculous
>spellings.

Sorry, e hoa, can't do her.  Written English is very nearly in the place
of written Chinese:  a notation shared by people whose _spoken_ languages
are not mutually comprehensible.  YOUR phonetic spelling is MY unsolvable
puzzle.  (For an English-speaker, trying to learn the IPA from an
American textbook is harder than you might think.)  This is one reason why
correct spelling is good manners:  spell-as-you-speak-and-mumble doesn't
work too well when the person at the other end doesn't know your dialect.