Friday, July 25, 2008

Can I just say I'm sick of the freaking English language?

I'm sick of writing "their" instead of "there". Meet you their, rather than meet you there. Really I think the whole English language should be re-transcribed, tackling the fundamental problem at the heart of English spelling: it was transcribed with the Latin alphabet, which only has 5 written vowels, whereas English has something like 14 vowel sounds. This is a problem. Let's compare this with Spanish which has 5 vowels and 5 vowel sounds. Sheer genius. We need an English spelling reform, because being an expat, all these annoying spelling exceptions are forgotten. And that's not okay when you are an English teacher. It's embarrassing being corrected by my students.

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