Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: revelling in the richness of English spelling. Robert Dessaix examines the case against spelling reform. Robert Dessaix: Not long ago in Melbourne, at ...

Take a look at the following English words: butcher, squirrel, mortgage, and choir. Does something seem off about them? At one point in time, the words move and love rhymed. So did blood, good, and ...

English spelling is funny. Really funny. So, following on from my poem about the strangeness of English spelling, I wanted to focus on one of the largest reasons why it is so weird. When my Early ...

Tear in eye your dress you’ll tear. So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer, Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it? Just compare heart, beard and heard, Dies and diet, lord and ...

Have you ever wondered why "choir" and "liar" rhyme, but "laughter" and "daughter" don't? Or why "sew" and "new" look like they should match, but sound nothing alike, while "kernel" and "colonel" are ...

I remember walking down a busy street in Delhi during my first stay in India and noting the different ways in which the same words were written in Latin script. Lakshmi here, Luxmi there. Since then I ...

This much-anticipated performance marks the first time DanceHouse will present a Taiwanese work. My own high school had done a pretty good job of teaching us how to spell in the 1950s, so I was ...

On her first day of Grade 4 in an unfamiliar school, Wenyi Yin could not have spelled "confusion" even if she'd wanted to. She had a fine command of Mandarin and French, but the morning announcements, ...

The answer to this seemingly innocuous question that comes up again and again involves the Jewish Enlightenment, Jewish diaspora nationalism, and a little-known protest in front of the Forverts ...

Revelling in the richness of English spelling. In the first of four programs, Robert Dessaix examines the case against spelling reform. Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: revelling in ...