dennis
83 posts

dennis
@dennissmen
Building @Mantasaur | We make brands visible to AI, not just humans. GEO & LLM optimization so ChatGPT recommends you — before your competitor. Founder sharing


Noam Chomsky once called English spelling "a near optimal system." You might think he was being ironic. Far from it. The silent 'b' in "bomb" reappears in "bombard." The silent 'n' in "hymn" is pronounced once again in "hymnal." The silent 'g' in "sign" comes back in "signal." English spelling keeps these words looking like the family they are, even when pronunciation pulls them apart. The past tense ending "-ed" is pronounced three different ways (-t in "jumped," -d in "played," and -ed in "painted"), but spelled the same every time. One spelling, one meaning: something happened in the past. English spelling is full of inconsistencies and silent letter because it’s not simply encoding how words sound. If English spelling were aiming to represent sound alone, it would indeed be a total failure. But that's not the kind of system English has. It encodes words' meaning and history as well.

























