It's been a long time (two and a half years, in fact) since this blog was last updated. This was due to a number of reasons, including lack of time and abundance of apathy, but now I'm back and ready to continue.
I won't attempt to include links to all the various articles and resources that I've come across since January 2006, but I thought I'd reopen the blog with a link to an article published in yesterday's Guardian. The article, by David Shariatmadari in the Comment is Free (CiF) section, discusses the merits or otherwise of making English spellings phonetic, based on an article in The Times by John Wells in which the author claims that British children are suffering at school because of the spelling difficulties inherent in the English language.
The argument in favour of phonetic spellings in English are probably spurious, but the comments that follow Shariatmadari's piece are very entertaining, and at times quite vitriolic (and, occasionally, educational). It's good to see that some people still regard this as a topic worth getting het up about.
