Mor reecently we had a membership vote for a house stile, and at the end we agreed on 4 basic rules: 1) cut redundant letters, 2) spel short vowels with the “rite” vowel (he ses, pritty, luv), dubbling the consonant ware necessary, 3) spel long vowels with the “rite” vowel and the magic-e sistem (lite, lode), 4) f for f (fone, enuf). Unfortunatly the resistance to using reformd spelling in our publications, especialy in the Comittee, is too strong, so it hasnt been put into practice yet. This para is ritten in HS (house stile).

In RITE your examples wud be speld nok (knock), til, quake, dependent, redundent, to no. The rules for the /k/ sound in english ar rather complicated, but farely consistent, so all we did was making them compleetly consistent (keltic, not celtis), so /kw/ is speld ‘qu’ az in tradicional spelling. We redused ‘know’ to ‘no’ becauz it is consistent with the cutting rule, and making the spelling dependent on derivvativs of the rute werd wud meen that u hav to chek all derivated werds befor spelling a rute werd, wich wud make spelling extreemly complicated. We made a ballot in the genral public and found out that 1/3 of the voters wer for ‘no’, 1/3 for ‘kno’ and 1/3 for ‘know’, so desided to just follo the rule and avoid an exeption. Tradicional spelling spels ‘speak’ but ‘speech’, explANation but explAIN (not explANe) and nobody complanes either…

In HS ‘redundant’ keeps its ‘a’, eeven if most reformers agree that it should hav the same final vowel as ‘dependent’. It was just a matter of reducing the number of rules to a minnimum.

Just a question: if u aprove of sum spelling changes, wy dont u use them in your articles? I can hardly imagin that english wil be reformd by politicians, from the top to the bottom. If it happens, i guess it wil be from the bottom to the top, so we hav to start it…

A figure or symbol of the female organ of generation as an object of veneration among the Hindus and others. Hence {sm}yonic a.

1799 Asiatick Researches III. 363 The navel of Vishnu, by which they mean the os tincæ, is worshipped as one and the same with the sacred yóni. 1879 M. MACFIE Relig. Parall. 27 The yonic or moon-worshippers of Chaldea… The yonic symbolism professed by their remote ancestors in Turkestan, who were originally worshippers of the female principle. 1906 WHATHAM in Amer. Jrnl. Relig. & Psychol. II. 44 In nature-worship, all natural orifices were reverenced as representing the yoni of the mother-earth goddess.

2) Dwarves, unlike the other words in -lf and -rf you mention, is not OE at all! It is an analogical formation of fairly recent date: the OED turns up sporadic 19th-century uses, but the main creator of dwarves is of course Tolkien. He knew perfectly well that the inherited form, had it survived, would have been dwarrows or dwerrows, but as he says “we no longer speak of a dwarf as often as we do of a man, or even of a goose”.

The use of dwarves amd dwarvish since Tolkien’s day has been widespread, and the same is true of the form dwarven, which Tolkien did not use in public print but which does appear in some of his now-published MSS. All of these are surely direct analogues of elves, elvish, elven, inherited forms all. But I do not know that there is anything particularly American about it: note that the Disney film (decidedly American but pre-Tolkien) is correctly Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.