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The problem with trying to do serious spelling reform in English is that the language already has two major "branches", British and American, and spelling refor

The problem with trying to do serious spelling reform in English is that the language already has two major "branches", British and American, and spelling reform would pretty much have to favor one over the other. It'd probably end up being based on American English, just based on number of users and because AmE spelling tends to be closer to pronunciation (sorry Brits, but it's true. We don't pronounce the -er suffix like we're French, and what the hell is going on with some of your town names like "Featherstonhaugh"). I can't see Commonwealth countries just lying down to accept that, and if you can't get all English users on board, then what's the point? Languages where a single country has a "majority stake in the cultural control" of a language tend to be able to pull off spelling reform (German, Chinese, etc.). Languages where this isn't the case (English, Portugese, French post-1900) find it a lot harder to gain the necessary consensus.

stordoff 7y ago
> what the hell is going on with some of your town names like "Featherstonhaugh" One theory is that it was confused with "Fanshawe". We aren't even _trying_ to write what it sounds like: > So Festonhaw, which is the recorded shortening of Featherstonhaugh, was somehow garbled further to something like Fesnaw or Feshnaw [...then...] we can just say that the garbled Feshnaw sounded so similar to the preexisting surname Fanshawe, that people just conflated the two surnames in speech. > But not in writing. > We don't pronounce the -er suffix like we're French Though interestingly you've kept that with "herb" - in British English, it has a hard H (but I'm not quite sure what you mean by the -er suffix - in my experience, it's the same in both. Did you mean -re?) https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-surname-Featherstonhaugh-get-its-completely-unintuitive-pronunciation https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-surname-Featherstonhaugh-g... It's not exclusively a British thing though - Connecticut and Poughkeepsie come to mind.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Connecticut, Poughkeepsie, and many, many other place names in the US are not English at all; they're names/words from various indigenous American languages. It's not fair to count these "against" American English, are there are good logical reasons to just use the established place names that the locals are already using, rather than worsening things by making up your own parallel set of place names.
rand84545 7y ago
Wouldn't it make sense to let the languge converge on its own? The majorty of weird rules in english (aka commonly misspelled words) are being kept by teachers/pedants/stupid HRs.

stordoff 7y ago

> what the hell is going on with some of your town names like "Featherstonhaugh" One theory is that it was confused with "Fanshawe". We aren't even _trying_ to write what it sounds like: > So Festonhaw, which is the recorded shortening of Featherstonhaugh, was somehow garbled further to something like Fesnaw or Feshnaw [...then...] we can just say that the garbled Feshnaw sounded so similar to the preexisting surname Fanshawe, that people just conflated the two surnames in speech. > But not in writing. > We don't pronounce the -er suffix like we're French Though interestingly you've kept that with "herb" - in British English, it has a hard H (but I'm not quite sure what you mean by the -er suffix - in my experience, it's the same in both. Did you mean -re?) https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-surname-Featherstonhaugh-get-its-completely-unintuitive-pronunciation https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-surname-Featherstonhaugh-g... It's not exclusively a British thing though - Connecticut and Poughkeepsie come to mind.

CydeWeys 7y ago
Connecticut, Poughkeepsie, and many, many other place names in the US are not English at all; they're names/words from various indigenous American languages. It's not fair to count these "against" American English, are there are good logical reasons to just use the established place names that the locals are already using, rather than worsening things by making up your own parallel set of place names.

rand84545 7y ago

Wouldn't it make sense to let the languge converge on its own? The majorty of weird rules in english (aka commonly misspelled words) are being kept by teachers/pedants/stupid HRs.