It really passes people off when a word doesn't at all look like it sounds, like in my elementary school spelling bee, I got out, and still remember it, with the word Herb, the previous year I got the word cabinet wrong. And, that was merely because of the pronunciation, I repeated the word as cabinet and spelled it as such. Not realizing my error I went on to pronounce herb first and spelled it error. Though, it is funny now, at the time I got quite angry. But, it is more common to hear people learning English complain about "silent" letters like k or g.
What came to mind was my daughter getting upset when a Dr. Seuss book used a Girraffe to represent G. And then a very funny skit where a kindergarten teacher is teaching letter sounds (one per letter) and says A is aye (long a sound) and represented commonly by an Ayepple. She looks at her picture of an Apple and starts to question if she has said it wrong her entire life!!
OK, my original thought was caused by a contemplation of various Alphabets, and how as an English speaker I love Icelandic because it is a phonetic language meaning it sounds like it is spelled (once you learn the sounds). I thought this was probably more important to a literate country. It had been said that Icelandic most closely represents old Norse language and so one can easily extrapolate what it sounded like. What I meant was to say that Iceland is a country where it's constituents have seen how words can be spoken from the past through text, and so even if the people no longer remain their word can be preserved if one has a cipher or phonetic language.
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