English is a creole of Saxon and Norman French.
Then we started to simplify it by getting rid of inflections and the like.
It once had some very specific additional letters - two separate characters for
hard 'th' (still found in Icelandic I think) and another for a soft 'th'
(thorn). These have been lost like the diacritical marks in Greek and Hebrew.
This is why there is so much discussion as to what is 'right'. To me, pure
English (NOT British) is what the BBC used to use until they got a bit carried
away with vernacular dialects.
There are well-spoken variants of this in the US and Australia where the local
accent is little more than a slight colour (with a 'u').
Betty Windsor does not speak it but rather an nasal aristocratic high English -
her voice has changed significantly during her reign.
None of the above use an abomination like 'gotten'.
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 27/05/2011, at 10:48 AM, Willie Wonka wrote:
> Here is what I mean. Take for example Bulgaria...:) The Bulgarian alphabet,
> at times wrongly called Cyrillic, has enough letters to reproduce all the
> sounds in the language and you never ever need to learn spelling. Everything
> is spelled the way it is pronounced. Why dont you add additional letters to
> the English alphabet (for example), make everything easy, really...in today's
> environment, kids could use the time to learn something important...because,
> I can tell you that the Bulgarian kids are done learning the alphabet and
> spelling by the third quarter of first grade. Everything else from then on is
> used for building up the vocabulary. This also allows the second graders to
> read at a level comparable to sixth even seventh grade in the English
> speaking countries.
--
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