Spelling

The ability of the human mind to recognize mis-spelled words is a good example of the current division between software and wetware.

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy,
it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are,
the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the
rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed
it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey
lteter. +

I now strongly suggest we should try to simplify the language. To try and do this in one attempt could be disastrous, so I think we should phase it in over a 5 year period. My suggestions are as follows, and I hope you will agree :

In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Sertainly, sivil servants will reseive this news with joy. Also, the hard "c" will be replased with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replased by "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. We will enkourage the removal of double letters, which have always been a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgraful, and they would go.

By the forth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" by "z" and "w" by "v".

During ze fifz year ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" , so Soup will then be known as Sup and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz year, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trobls or difikultis and evrivum vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru.

See also:

• http://spellerpages.sourceforge.net/ uses aspell (there is finally a win32 port of aspell) and javascript to provide a VERY nice server based spell checker.
• http://www.codeproject.com/asp/spell_check.asp (cached 2007.02.28 17:30:53)
• http://orangoo.com/labs/GoogieSpell/ This is the one!

  .