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And English is terrible as a language! We’ve been making fun of how bad it is for centuries. Compare languages like Turkish or Korean, which are still natural
by ken 7y ago
And English is terrible as a language! We’ve been making fun of how bad it is for centuries.
Compare languages like Turkish or Korean, which are still natural languages but got a well-thought-out tune-up in the not-so-distant past.
Why can’t my language have a pluralization rule (for example) that’s so simple and regular it takes 1 minute to teach, and 3 minutes to master? Or an alphabet that looks like how it is pronounced, so we don’t have to waste hours each week as children memorizing thousands of special cases? This is absurd.
- gjm11 7y agoIt could! Given enough international cooperation, we could all adopt a lightly modified version of English that's more regular and easier to teach and learn. And then, over the coming years, it would absorb words from other languages with different rules, and evolve according to what people find easy or convenient (or just at random), and in a little while it would be irregular once again. As you said, Turkish and Korean were changed recently. Give them time and some of that regularity will get chipped away. (Also, of course: make substantial changes to how the language works and suddenly no one can comfortably read any of the vast quantities of existing writing unless it's translated. And some of that existing writing is really good.)