My point was that Polish orthography accurately represents the different sounds in the language, so it’s actually very sensible and useful the way it is, however much monoglot English speakers may complain about it for looking weird to their eyes. You Poles did the very best you could with the Latin alphabet that was so ill-suited to the sounds of your language. It’s a consequence of aligning with the Pope in Rome; along with that comes the Latin alphabet as a package deal, and you’ve made the best of a bum deal, alphabetically speaking. If you’d gone Orthodox instead, you’d have the Cyrillic alphabet to work with, although truth be told it isn’t much better suited to Polish than the Latin one is.
Ah, the eternal metaphysical mystery of unity in plurality and plurality in unity. A diphthong is a combination of two sounds.
…and is different from either of those sounds.
Absolutely. I agree that it’s a very phonetic language. Not 100%, but pretty damned close. There are some ambiguities from transcribing words into their spellings, but, generally, words are pronounced as they’re written, provided you know the rules. (Like the “i” following “c,” “s,” and “z,” rule mentioned, or a word that ends with “ł” after a consonant devoices it, etc.)
Not true at all. First, as I pointed out above, the Chancery Standard was the beginning of spelling standardization in English and that pre-dated the printing press by about 30 years. Secondly, while the press did contribute to standardization, it didn’t do it all by itself or immediately. In fact in some ways it probably delayed things, since it introduced more people who influenced spelling. More authors were being published and they all had different spellings of various words, editors may or may not have changed the spelling of a given word and the same for typesetters.
Oh, and please no one suggest dictionaries as influencing standardization. The fact is, relatively few people consult dictionaries when spelling. Noah Webster had all kinds of spellings that did not become the standard in his dictionaries. People largely ignored them. His spelling book was much more influential.
Perhaps the better way to think about it is that dictionaries were part of a larger campaign to standardize spelling. One weapon in the artillery. The combination of dictionaries, spellers, English teachers, and pundits each reinforcing the other and harping on the same issues was successful in creating the notion that inferior spelling meant inferior minds.
Poor old Sam Johnson was but a harmless drudge, I guess.
I think the conundrum can be summed up thusly:
“Silent letters” are what you get when the Roman alphabet is imposed onto the languages spoken by the native Britons they conquered.
From your link:
Sure but standardization and simplification are two different things. And, I would ague, the presence of spellings considered ‘traditional’ speaks to an already extant idea of standardization.
Either way, it’s silly and unhistorical to consider Sam Johnson’s dictionary as influential to the state of spelling in his society or later. It was historically important as a dictionary, but that’s not at all the same thing.
I don’t consider Webster’s color, rather than colour, an earth-shaking advance, nor the substantial loss of meaning in the U.S. between, for example, practise and practice. But, of course, Webster’s purview has always been narrow, along with its rejection of many of his other spelling “reforms.”
My father was a professor of Education, and specifically, History of Education. I assume some of this tales have some credibility:
He claimed that the spelling changes ( colour → color etc.; suffix “ise” → “ize” and others ) arose from a deliberate attempt in early independent United States to “de-British-[del]ise[/del]ize” the new nation. There was a fashion in the early American republic to overtly reject much that was seen as British, the better to establish us as a new independent nation with an independent culture.
Tweaking the spelling apparently was part of that fashion. (But if so, the differences between British and American spelling strike me a being few and minor. Why not much more?)
To some extent, because the public didn’t accept many of Webster’s reforms. Webster proposed many more radical changes. From here:
As noted further on in the article, Webster himself gave ground on some of his own changes in later editions. American spelling would be far more different from British if all of Webster’s changes had held.
In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt also attempted to promote spelling reform proposed by the Simplified Spelling Board, but was thwarted by backlash from the publick;) and Congress.
I gave that exact link in post #35. Et tu, Colibri?
Hey, I sometimes have trouble remembering what I ate for breakfast, let alone what was posted five days ago.
In my defense, I provided additional information.
Four days, but who’s counting? 
That would be 0.97 centihours for those playing in the metric thread.
The way Hmong is written uses silent letters in a fairly unique way. Hmong has seven tones which, for obvious reasons, are difficult to convey using the roman alphabet. When the language’s orthography was developed in the 50’s, the developers took “unused” consonants (unused in the sense that they do not occur in Hmong phonology) and assigned each one a tone and then tacked them on to the end of words to indicate the proper tone. So the word “Hmong” when written in Hmong is spelled Hmoob where the final “b” only indicates that the word is pronounced with a high-falling tone.
Did your numerators and denominators go upsydaisium? I think you meant 0.96 hectohours.
0.97 centihours is 58 minutes.