>"Supersede" just looks
>goofy-- like it should be pronounced with a short "e" ("e" as in "Ed").
As you learned in grade school, the 'e' at the end of the word makes the 'e'
in the middle long. "Supersed" would be pronounced with a short 'e';
"supersede" is pronounced with a long 'e'.
>we have "recede", "intercede", ...
English spelling is not consistent. But the advent of standardized spelling
was an extraordinary boon to human progress. Probably most people on this
mailing list are skilled readers and can read very fast; the speed at which
we can read these days was quite impossible prior to standardized spelling.
It matters more that we all spell the words the same way than that the
spelling is optimal. Furthermore, since pronunciations change throughout
time, the best a revised spelling system could do would be to capture the
pronunciation of the words at a particular moment, not to mention only in
particular dialects. (Some English spelling oddities have to do with this
sort of thing, e.g. the 'ght' words like "night".)
Indeed, there are some similarities between the considerations in spelling
and those in usenet news protocols. It's more important that we all spell
Supersedes the same way than that the spelling is ideal. Spelling it a
new way just gets you incompatibility, even if you think your spelling is
somehow better.
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