[...] > Latin alphabet which it then continues to mess up and not 'several
phonetic systems' as you claim.
I taught the history of English, starting with Anglo-Saxon. Trust me, I
know whereof I speak. English spelling is pretty consistently phonetic
by origin, with the usual quota of exceptions. If you know something of
the source language, you will have much less trouble spelling than if
you don't. You'll also have much less trouble figuring out what the word
means, but that's another issue.
Granted, considering how badly spelling is taught in English speaking
schools, it's amazing English speakers spell as well as they do. Eg,
crap about "long a" and "short a", when the two sounds labelled thus are
not long/short versions of each other. The long a is heard in "father",
the short one in "cat". Anyone who thinks otherwise has been thoroughly
corrupted by bad teaching.
The problem with English spelling is that the mapping of phonemes onto
onto graphemes is multiple in both directions. All the phonemes (sounds)
except one map onto two or more graphemes (a sign or group of signs
standing for a sound); and the vast majority of graphemes map onto two
or more phonemes. The only sensible way to teach spelling is not to
start with letters, but with sounds. BTW, there's a word (and its
derivatives) whose spelling omits a phoneme.
I once taught a very bad speller how to spell by starting with
fundamentals: the sounds of English. For each sound we looked at all the
ways it is spelled. Eg, how many ways is /sh/ spelled? (BTW, <sh> is not
the most common one). She ended up being an above average speller, which
convinced me to help all my classes by introducing the phoneme/grapheme
concept, and teaching a handful of representative examples.
English does use several different phonetic systems, and *inconsistently* (my emphasis)
at that, as you claim which is why it is such a 'wonderful mishmash'.
But how on earth does this 'different sound systems' tally with your claim
that all alphabets are phonetic?
Because that's what alphabets do: they represent sounds.
Actually, all writing systems are phonetic, but in different ways. Eg,
Chinese writing consists of a (large but manageable) group of basic
signs, such as the one for "man/human", plus an enormous group of
complex signs. Each complex sign consists of two parts, one that
suggests the meaning (by a kind of visual pun), plus one of the basic
signs that indicates the pronunciation. This is what enables people to
read signs that are no longer used. Context of course also offers clues
to meaning, but that's another (and IMO crucial) question.
Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan glyphs are constructed the same way.
The Egyptians later developed a simpler system, a combination of
syllabics and alphabetic signs. The Phoenicians took that system,
simplified it further, and invented the one sound = one sign alphabet.
Almost all known alphabets are derived from theirs. Alpha, beta are the
Greek versions of the Phoenician words that translated the names of the
Egyptian signs, which were in turn simplifications of pictures
representing objects whose names began with that sound.
Syllabics are strictly phonetic, but the signs represent combinations of
sounds, not single sounds.
And BTW, I gather the weather in the UK is gona be just touching the mid-20s
all this week. Where did you get the 'low 30s Celcius' from?
I live in Mid-northern Ontario. I use British spellings (mostly) because
I prefer them. Canadian spelling is a mishmash of US and British.
HTH
