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On 12/12/12 15:10, Philip Hudson wrote:
On 11 Dec, 2012, at 2:41 pm, Julian Hall wrote:I think we all agree though that MM/DD/YYYY is confusing though?But we've already established that this is no reason to abandon The Way Things Are, right? Nor is irrationality, difficulty, inconsistency, stupidity...Those who insist on keeping UK spelling, should you not also accept -- even applaud -- US date ordering? And clamor for its adoption here? Would it not be more in keeping with perverse UK spelling than the rational date notation we do in fact use, and therefore, I don't know, somehow better?Just call me Socrates. -- Phil Hudson http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz @UWascalWabbit PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63
You say UK spelling is perverse - how about US spelling? You say its more logical to write color than colour but I dont know anyone - even in the US who pronounces color as it is written: co -lo-r . So to be logical in the UK do we spell it colur (us) clr (devon) celer (kensington) culur (birmingham) cyuler(afro carribean community) or coulourrrrrrr (western isles). Or the colour voilet which is pronounce vilet, violet and wylet (many asian communities lack a 'v' in speech and substitute w ) byiolet (some spanish use something very similar to b). And how do we ensure that it is distinguished from homophones in the various accents across the UK, Canada and any other countries who pretend to speak english? And since the idea of making it easier to spell will mean the language will change rapidly - teens pointedly make their own versions of languages and accents that are deliberately different from their non-peer group - but since we have agreed that they can spell phonetically we cant tell them at school we don’t know what the hell they've written and will have to give them high marks to avoid looking foolish. Language changes, accents change but (mostly) meaning doesn’t. A lot of people mistake changes for evolution - they are merely the mutations that may or not be tested in the wild for decades before being found useful. It may seem logical to you to spell colour 'color' even though you don't pronounce it that way but to most of us it will cause confusion and in the not so long run be wrong.
Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq