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Stop. I tried to summarize what I read in Kenneally. I have my own theories on all of this, but none of them are in the posts I've written. I listened to a couple of lectures on YouTube, but beyond that I have no idea what any of these people are doing in enough detail to argue with their work one way or another.
Kenneally is trying to cover a lot of ground in a general overview. Try to remember I was reporting on how she laid out the arguments...
``Indians do seem to be winning these spelling bees, and clearly we have been successful in the evolutionary game (there are a billion of us), so perhaps there is a selective advantage to spelling skills?''
Chompsky, Chomsky. Consider the p silent. BTW, it was a typo and mental habit of writing the way I speak. No insult was intended. My excuse is that I am running emacs on XP and the spell dictionaries don't work in the import.
As to the adaptive advantages, oh, yes there certainly are. I had to take freshman composition three times, and I was flunked out of senior English in high school.
It gets worse. I am terrible at foreign languages and only took the easy ones...Spanish, French and Italian.... I couldn't spell them either, especially French.
CG