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Author Topic:   Letters That Don't Make Any Sense
Nij
Member (Idle past 4919 days)
Posts: 239
From: New Zealand
Joined: 08-20-2010


Message 15 of 21 (585043)
10-05-2010 8:54 AM
Reply to: Message 14 by frako
10-05-2010 6:59 AM


But then you'd be introducing a new letter to take the place of a consonant pair, where the individual parts already exist.
It's more efficient to have the two letters which can be either separate or connected, than to have 2 letters plus a third letter to represent their combination.
Serbian and other Cyrillic languages pretty much all use phonetic alphabets, hence the use of things like e.g. 'ch' 'sh' 'shch' 'ts' -- CBF putting the proper Cyrillic in -- instead of just putting the corresponding letters together in a word.
Those languages also lack the individual letter 'h' hence multiple letters where English just pairs up already-existing ones. Romance alphabets use letters more efficiently, hence needing fewer of them.

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 Message 14 by frako, posted 10-05-2010 6:59 AM frako has not replied

  
Nij
Member (Idle past 4919 days)
Posts: 239
From: New Zealand
Joined: 08-20-2010


Message 18 of 21 (585128)
10-05-2010 11:23 PM
Reply to: Message 16 by seanfhear
10-05-2010 8:34 PM


Re: Why do we need "C"?
Why isn’t phonics spelled foniks
Similarly with 'graph', 'elephant' and any otehr word using that stupid ph.
I find it especially amusing given that many of those words have a Greek root, where that consonant pair is represented by a single letter. And that letter already has an equivalent in nearly every language that only uses a single letter.
Perhaps a better question would be "who the hell decided to use PH when translating instead of the normal bloody F like everyone else?!"

This message is a reply to:
 Message 16 by seanfhear, posted 10-05-2010 8:34 PM seanfhear has not replied

Replies to this message:
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