@RegDwigнt It gets easier after the 10,000 measure

@Robusto Homographobia in Mr Shiny's answer there

@Mitch I've read that answer at least twice now and I still don't know what point he's making. It's irrelevant to my question anyhow, since I was talking about a writing system granting a certain felicity, not some fear of abandonment gumming up some reader's works. At best his argument is tangential; at worst, unrelated.

How often would one use call for visit these days? Less often than formerly, to be sure, but how much less?

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Mostly non-latin answer (50): Why can't the word "can" be used in future tense (will can)? by praneet buttara on english.SE

hi

@Robusto I've just now reread and I similarly have trouble figuring out what his point is. The commment thread shows he is leaning towards pronunciation writing. Shreevatsr is only complaining about the argument structure, not the result.

But I think the argument 'others do fine without the redundancy' is an argument by analogy which is problematic only if the analogy doesn't hold well.

But the problem of homographophobia is a different argument.

@Mitch I still don't see that there's a consistent analogy there. My point was that one can have a pre-apprehensive grasp of word meanings without having them spelled out letter by letter. When I show you a picture of a sun you think of the thing, not the letters. When the Japanese see kanji words they think of the words without having the syllables spelled out for them. And I wondered if that situation obtained to some degree for the readers of the crap orthography of English.

@Robusto There's a whole lot going on here. There's the initial 'is idiosyncracy (far from one-to-one mapping) helpful in transmission?', there's 'is redundancy helpful?', there's 'spoken vs written', 'ideographs vs phonological writing', 'learners vs experts', 'whole word vs 'phonics', and the meta-issues of 'black and white dichotomy vs continuum', 'correlated but not identical arguments', etc

also arguments from data/study vs compelling anecdote

oh 'human biology vs mathematical codes', 'cultural investment vs technical debt'

@Robusto Which is to say that what you say is reasonable, sure I'd expect some of the idiosyncrasy of Kanji/English orthography helps disambiguate in reading, but Defrancis article argues that since there's no problem with ambiguity in speech, if the writing was phonetic, there would also be no problem (and that people who complain, the homographophobes, are ignoring that very simple point).

Reading and speech are not the same thing.

@Robusto of course. I mentioned that in my list. But the analogy of idiosyncrasy/redundancy in the code should apply similarly. So really it's a question of degree; is the amount of idiosyncrasy necessary or useful enough or can it be removed with no loss of accuracy i.e. What is the threshold?

I'm coming back to this after a long period as an absentee/observer, but I'm seeing more than one knee-jerk downvote on single word requests that turn the question to a hold from MetaEd. english.stackexchange.com/questions/475126/… is an example.

As I put in my comment there, the OP had more than enough information to provide better guidance than a down-vote.

@PhilN. Hi Phil. The rules regarding single-word-requests have probably changed since you last visited us. They now require an exemplary context which demonstrates how the word might be used, so that people can determine ancillary details like appropriate part of speech, connotations and degree of formality. It also helps to show that the word is needful enough to possibly exist.

Now personally, I suspect that the absolutism of needing a fill-in-the-blank sentence is leading to a degradation of average S.W.R. quality because noncompliance can have otherwise more detailed questions closed in favor of less detailed questions which do comply, but on the bright side people do have a better idea of which part of speech to suggest.

@PhilN. A post that requests ideas or suggestions is generally not a good fit for SE -- it's subjective, there are no real right answers. Real questions have answers. This is why many, probably most, SWRs are not a good fit.

Furthermore, we often get SWRs where the person actually knows the word but just can't recall it. That is completely subjective -- it's a guessing game question.

An SWR can be a good fit when the request is objective -- the asker includes the desired connotation, register (formality), part of speech, and context in which it is to be used, and the exact enclosing sentence or passage. That is generally enough specificity for there to be a right answer. It's no longer a request for ideas or suggestions.

Or, an SWR can be a good fit even when it's subjective, as long as it meets the requirements of a good subjective question. A good subjective question is expert-level, unique, particularly interesting and thought-provoking, shows substantial effort and research, and demands responses that meet the same standards. It's not a drive-by "can you help me think of some words".

The key here is "expert-level".

I think that's all my thoughts on SWRs. I'd be glad to discuss with you further.

Something else that needs to be noted is that this particular question has some idea of where to start, and E.L.U. has always wanted a thesaurus to be checked prior to consulting us when that's the case.