Reasons Why The English Language Is Hard To Learn:
“Weird Al” Yankovic - Word Crimes
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss.
Become a member of the The Apostrophe Protection Society today!
Poem:
Eye stold dis frum anodder net. Candidate for a Pullet Surprise Often called “An Owed to the Spelling Checker”
by Jerrold H. Zar
I have a spelling checker - It came with my PC. It plane lee marks four my revue Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
Eye ran this poem threw it, Your sure reel glad two no. Its vary polished in it's weigh, My checker tolled me sew.
A checker is a bless sing, It freeze yew lodes of thyme. It helps me right awl stiles two reed, And aides me when aye rime.
To rite with care is quite a feet Of witch won should be proud. And wee mussed dew the best wee can, Sew flaws are knot aloud.
And now bee cause my spelling Is checked with such grate flare, Their are know faults with in my cite, Of nun eye am a wear.
Each frays come posed up on my screen Eye trussed to bee a joule The checker poured o'er every word To cheque sum spelling rule.
That's why aye brake in two averse By righting wants too pleas. Sow now ewe sea why aye dew prays Such soft wear for pea seas!
If an S and an I and an O and a U
With an X at the end spell Su;
And an E and a Y and an E spell I,
Pray what is a speller to do?
Then, if also an S and an I and a G
And an HED spell side,
There's nothing much left for a speller to do
But to go commit siouxeyesighed. — Charles Follen Adams, “An Orthographic Lament”
The New Age of REASON Spelling: See “The New Age of REASON” by John M. Culkin, Science Digest-August 1981.
“The English alphabet is pure insanity. It can hardly spell any word in the language with any large degree of certainty. …The silliness of the English alphabet are quite beyond enumeration. Where as the English orthography needs…simplifying, the English alphabet needs it two or three million times more.” - Mark Twain.
…an intelligent child who is bidden to spell “DEBT”, and very properly spells it “D-E-T”, is caned for not spelling it with a “B” because Julius Caesar spelled it with a “B”. - George Bernard Shaw. Alfubet F/\R hu Komput.r /_\j
See also:“Alfubet F/\R hu Komput.r /_\j” (Tittle is close has I could get in ASCII.) by John Culkin-Science Digest- August 1982. “UNIFON, a phonetic alphabet that is five times more efficient than our ABC's, may revolutionize reading and writing and help us communicate better with computers.” …“Fans of UNIFON don't want to wait another 3,000 years before eliminating the illogic from our language.” The UNIFON Alphabet (Trade mark) is by John Malone.
UNIFON is now part of the Unicode standard, (UNIFON:U+E740 - U+E76F).
What is Unicode? It's a 16-bit character code standard (also known as ISO 10646) which is intended to provide character codes for, in principle, all the world's written languages.