3 ms·

Don't take this the wrong way, but it's funny to read a post complaining of the bad relation between written word and pronunciation of a language when said post

• pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Roughly, through what means should we fix it though? :)
  • notechback 7y ago
    I don't know about English but other languages have a central body that manages the language, eg implementing spelling reforms. Eg German and French have a simplification every few decades (done by a central process) and a regular process for introducing/recognising new words. In German the words are based on common usage; in French more by committee decision as they want to avoid too many loan words - so "digital" in German is "digital", in French it's "numérique" which was invented specifically to avoid "digital" being the main word, but either way the spelling was normalised at some point).
    • cmehdy 7y ago
      The Académie Française tries really hard to be prescriptive, and perhaps that works for the handful of elitist writers hanging out around Saint-Germain-des-Prés but it definitely can't keep up with the connected world, the language that is actually spoken and used by everyone, and often gives in by being descriptive with a noticeable lag and awkwardness. It is more of a self-congratulatory circle of elites trying to uphold a (400 year-old) tradition for the fun of it, and the population often decides to use vastly different words regardless of what is considered a "real word" in French.
      • huhtenberg 7y ago
        It also happens a (400 year-old) tradition that was quite intentionally set up to be overly complex so to prevent unwashed gray masses from learning "proper" written French and to keep it reserved for the elite. I can't find a link right now, but there was an interview with a French linguist who explained the history of the grammar and how it came about. Was quite an eye opener and helped making some sense of why it is so bizarre.
        • qwerty456127 7y ago
          It's easy enough for a foreigner to learn it in a year (so all what's left is to expand the vocabulary and polish the pronunciation). How can it be hard enough to prevent natives from learning "proper" written French? Was it also illegal to teach them so being hard enough to be impossible to figure out intuitively was sufficient?
  • buckminster 7y ago
    What you need is some guy to make a few half-assed changes to spellings that don't actually come anywhere close to fixing the problem, but are just enough to create incompatibility with other users of the language. :)
• madhadron 7y ago
  The sad part is that this is after the spelling reforms of revolutionary America that did improve the mapping.