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The design of orthographies has received much less attention from linguists than the problem deserves.
There has been a tendency on the part of many American linguists to assume that a phonemic transcription will automatically be the best possible orthography and that the only real problem will then be the social one of securing acceptance.
This seems naive.
Most others have been content to give only the most general attention to the broadest and most obvious features of the phonology when designing orthographies.
Apparently the feeling is that anything more would be involvement in technical abstrusenesses of possible pedantic interest but of no visible significance in practical affairs.
The result of this attitude has been the domination of many orthography conferences by such considerations as typographic ' esthetics ', which usually turns out to be nothing more than certain prejudices carried over from European languages.
Many of the suggested systems seem to have only the most tenuous relationship to the language structures that they purport to represent.
Linguists have not always been more enlightened than `` practical people '' and sometimes have insisted on incredibly trivial points while neglecting things of much greater significance.
As a result, many people have been confirmed in their conviction that orthography design is not an activity to which experts can contribute anything but confusion.

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