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Fan, issue 6, February 1946
Page 4
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FAN syllabile clusters of their NAME-SOUND in the alphabet list. Thus I'l bcnu is so much punnery to a person learning English, as he first must be familiar with the various forms of the verb to be, the active participle seeing (cn), and the proper spelling of the second person singular. Having u in one place stand for our sound you, but in another place functioning as cut and yet another time appearing as mute accomplishes virtually nothing in the matter of making things more simple. We are right back where we started from, having taken the high road instead of the low road. Furthermore, with Ackermanese the foreigner must learn the use of certain letters as alphabet-sounds in addition to their confusing guises in regular speech. The above mentioned use of cn only adds to the burden of the student, because he must then learn not to pronounce cut as seeyoutee. And the pl in exampl is an entirely different pl than in place or uplift. Another trick is the introduction of numerical symbols to take the place of certain unisyllabic prepositions such as b4 replacing the connective before. A Frenchman or German learning Ackermanese first would think us crazy when we had to explain that the number "4" was substituted in "b4" in the place of the old fashioned word for "for", this small preposition already being one of the most phonetically clear situations in our dictionary. The same observation goes for the fantastic use of 2 for "to", the foregoing also being a very difficult word to confuse. As for to, too, and two, a progressive vocabulary would substitute "also" for "too", nobody suffering any loss for the additional swap. It should be fairly apparent by now that Ackermanese only throws stumbling blocks in the way of the foreign-speaking student. Naturally, of course, we assume that Ackerman has been plugging this for years as a serious project of linguistic betterment. But how about the other scoring point for simple spelling systens? Can it be said that Ackermanese would make our orthography more facile when learned from the bottom up the way we do as children? With a few exceptions, the answer seems to be in the negative; rather, we are merely placing one set of irregular phonetics over another equally as bad. There seems no rational justification for spelling right as rite, or spelling time as tym, as Ackerman does on many occasions. Further, our irregular system of phonetics makes it easy to distinguish on paper between such homophones as right, write, rite, and wright. Along the same lines, Ackermanese offers no clarification of the purely Teutonic problem of internal vowel flexions in certain verbs classed as "strong" I c and I saw are even more confusing than I see and I saw, nor is there any trend towards simplification in I fyt and I fot. In the regular spelling one has the old Gaellic root to guide by. Furthermore monosyllabic o words do not convey the 4
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FAN syllabile clusters of their NAME-SOUND in the alphabet list. Thus I'l bcnu is so much punnery to a person learning English, as he first must be familiar with the various forms of the verb to be, the active participle seeing (cn), and the proper spelling of the second person singular. Having u in one place stand for our sound you, but in another place functioning as cut and yet another time appearing as mute accomplishes virtually nothing in the matter of making things more simple. We are right back where we started from, having taken the high road instead of the low road. Furthermore, with Ackermanese the foreigner must learn the use of certain letters as alphabet-sounds in addition to their confusing guises in regular speech. The above mentioned use of cn only adds to the burden of the student, because he must then learn not to pronounce cut as seeyoutee. And the pl in exampl is an entirely different pl than in place or uplift. Another trick is the introduction of numerical symbols to take the place of certain unisyllabic prepositions such as b4 replacing the connective before. A Frenchman or German learning Ackermanese first would think us crazy when we had to explain that the number "4" was substituted in "b4" in the place of the old fashioned word for "for", this small preposition already being one of the most phonetically clear situations in our dictionary. The same observation goes for the fantastic use of 2 for "to", the foregoing also being a very difficult word to confuse. As for to, too, and two, a progressive vocabulary would substitute "also" for "too", nobody suffering any loss for the additional swap. It should be fairly apparent by now that Ackermanese only throws stumbling blocks in the way of the foreign-speaking student. Naturally, of course, we assume that Ackerman has been plugging this for years as a serious project of linguistic betterment. But how about the other scoring point for simple spelling systens? Can it be said that Ackermanese would make our orthography more facile when learned from the bottom up the way we do as children? With a few exceptions, the answer seems to be in the negative; rather, we are merely placing one set of irregular phonetics over another equally as bad. There seems no rational justification for spelling right as rite, or spelling time as tym, as Ackerman does on many occasions. Further, our irregular system of phonetics makes it easy to distinguish on paper between such homophones as right, write, rite, and wright. Along the same lines, Ackermanese offers no clarification of the purely Teutonic problem of internal vowel flexions in certain verbs classed as "strong" I c and I saw are even more confusing than I see and I saw, nor is there any trend towards simplification in I fyt and I fot. In the regular spelling one has the old Gaellic root to guide by. Furthermore monosyllabic o words do not convey the 4
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