Z_mann, on 21 Jan 2009, 0:02, said:
Аре јоу абсолутелеј цертаин тхат ис цореццт? Бецаусе и'м нот со суре мајселф...
Essentially, spelling is arbitrary just as the symbols used to represent words are arbitrary. The only thing that makes any writing English is that it is understood to be English by others. If I decide to write English in Chinese characters, then most of you would say it's no longer English. But what if you and the rest of English speakers had learned that each of those characters had an English word associated with it, just as they have Chinese words associated with them as well? To take the matter even further, there are actually languages that are written in
more than one writing system. Serbian for example can be written in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Korean, for a while at least, was written with both the native Hangul system and Chinese characters.
So the matter is simply whether a certain manner of writing is accepted by speakers of that language. English speakers are likely to accept only the Latin alphabet, and only when the letters of that alphabet are arranged in the ways according to English spelling rules. Yet my point is still shown: writing is merely a representation of language, and does not have any bearing on the internal structure of the language itself. English is still English no matter how you represent its words.
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