Since the invention of the printing press and mass-produced books in the 15th century, silent letters/syllables in written texts have unnecessarily hastened deforestation
Since the invention of the printing press and mass-produced books in the 15th century, silent letters/syllables in written texts have unnecessarily hastened deforestation
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If there is no demand for wood, forests have no value and will be cut down to make room for something valuable by the invisible hand of the market.
I used to buy boxes for almost 10 years. Paper companies plant trees to replenish their supply. I bet they’ve sold off parts of their forests since the internet and “paperless” started. Lost jobs for loggers, paper mills have shut down, and then all the lost loads for truckers. Switching from bottles to cans equals less boxes. Emails and PDF is less paper. If we weren’t ordering online all the time the impact would be even greater.
They might be silent when spoken but still offer disambiguation between words/meanings when written e.g. "dam" vs "damn".
Many words are written the same way. In both cases, context is what does the actual trick. If you read "the damn was 10 meters high" it goes as far as assuming a typo.
Ah, the famous tar.gz printing
A lot of paper is wasted because we tend to use standard "document sized" paper (A4, US Letter).
For content that is not designed to fill the page (poster or whatever) it will fill a random amount of the final page and on average half of that sheet will be wasted.
If smaller paper sizes were used more often it could save a fair bit.
Smaller paper sizes would waste a lot more paper because the margins would be a bigger portion of the sheet.
Not sure about silent letters specifically, but we could certainly compress our language to the smallest lossless format.
Not sure about silent letters specifically, but we could certainly compress our language to the smallest lossless format.
ASL peeps should check in on this conversation