sexist language
Richard A. O'Keefe
ok at quintus.uucp
Wed Nov 23 16:18:54 AEST 1988
In article <17618 at adm.BRL.MIL> rbj at 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.
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