[ExI] need a new word/suffix

Dan TheBookMan danust2012 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 13 21:08:28 UTC 2016


On Jan 13, 2016, at 12:45 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ​re Shavian alphabet
> 
> The problem I see is just like what happened to Esperanto and the Dvorak keyboard:  people spent a lot of time devising these and to no ultimate purpose.  No big authority like the government adopted them.  No schools taught them because nobody said they had to.
> 
> Just as Windows people want to cling to the Start box, there's a lot of inertia in language.  Words like 'smog' got picked up rapidly by other meteorologists and they got national attention, so it was easy to move that into the language​​.    ​
> 
> ​I agree that in the long run, antiquated spelling will eventually get replaced, but WHEN?​  How to popularize?  

I think it's interesting to step back and look at these things more soberly. Was/is Dvorak keyboard really better? (I think the case is not as clear cut as Dvorak crackpots -- er, aficionados believe.;) Why do so called antiquated spellings persist? (Might have more to do with social status than matching phonetics. The spellings of "could," "would," and "should" seem to be examples of that.)

You also highlight a problem here with designing something to fix a problem no one much cares about. Of course, one can know ahead of time that a different keyboard layout or a neologism won't catch on. (Or can one? The idea of coming up with s replacement for -phobia endings sounds more arcane and is in the area of replacing existing words or word endings. "Smog" kind of describes something that, to my knowledge, didn't have a simple noun for before. It also came up with a simple nontechnical word that sounds like it fits.;)

Gravity waves, anyone?

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst
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