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"John R. Rose" wrote: > The reason it is evolving is that it is not a dead language. > Only dead languages cease to evolve. OK, John, I agree with you that all living languages evolve. Fair enough. The thing is that at this moment the codification (or what Ferdinand de Saussure would call the 'signifiant') of the concept of 'the action of respiration' (Saussure's 'signifié') in (American) English is 'breathe'. Not 'breath'. However, in time, your language may EVOLVE into using the form 'breath' for this. However, this will not happen until persons of a higher 'status' start using the new form. And I don't think that there is ANY person on this list that the general American public holds in particularly high esteem. Of course there are other factors that come into play, but I'll skip those for the moment... > As far as creative spelling goes, Mark Twain, a quintessential American, > said it best when he said, > "I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way." OK, Mark Twain MAY have been a great writer but a (great) linguist he was not! A wrong spelling slows down the reader as we, as you may know, read shapes and not individual letters. Wrong spellings produce unfamiliar 'shapes' in our mind and we have to slow down and interpret the individual letters and combine them into a familiar concept in our mental lexicon. This takes time. And there is enough stuff to read on these lists already with all the unfruitful 'dissin' taking place. -- Hilsen/Regards, Peter Fjelsten ICQ 17839090 TekDykningsWeb 3.0: http://welcome.to/pf (B.A. in English language and literature.) -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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