5 ms·

> We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language How can we standardise English when we can't even agree on the spelling of the word 's

• airstrike 6y ago
  That's a pretty liberal interpretation of democratic, or a thinly veiled claim that other languages are perhaps "less democratic". If the official body represents the will of the people, then how is it not democratic? Saying that English is a pretty anarchic language would probably be a more accurate statement, not that there's anything wrong with that fact.
  • retrac 6y ago
    > If the official body represents the will of the people As anyone who speaks French can tell you, the official body's prescriptions often have no relationship to the will of the people regarding how they actually use the language. There's quite something to the polysynthetic view where modern French has a verb system with extensive clitics, but such an analysis devoid of appropriate genuflection to Latin gives les grammairiens anciens fits.
    • afiori 6y ago
      French is well known* to be on the complete opposite spectrum in terms of speed of evolution or disposition to adopt new words/constructs. Surely there is an happy middle ground. * as most well known things without strong factual basis
    • cyphar 6y ago
      Not to mention that many variants of French (Canadian French, Swiss French, Belgian French, and so on) would -- to my understanding -- not be considered by Académie Française to be "proper French" even though they are objectively French (mutually intelligible) and yet have deviated despite the formation of the Académie Française in the 1600s and its continued existence since the 1800s. I don't see how the situation would be different with English (especially given that French was not as international in the 1600s as English is today -- so that ship has long since sailed). Not to mention that English spelling reforms have been tried many times in the past and rarely caught on within a single country let alone worldwide[1]. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...
  • AmericanChopper 6y ago
    People already use the English language in a manner fitting their will. If you wanted to try and standardize it internationally, you’d either need most speakers to change to the standardized version (not going to happen), or you’d just end up publishing a canonical version for reference which everybody ignores (seems a bit pointless). More importantly, why would you want to do this? It just seems like a compulsive reaction to the purity of standardization. If inter-dialect communication is the goal, why not establish a standard accent as well?
  • wolco2 6y ago
    A system to introduce new words in English exists and it is not anarchic. It's a democratic or popularity contest where if a word is used enough it becomes part of the language and accepted. Dictionaries have standards where a word must appear in print a number of times to be accepted. Other languages are less dynamic so they are less responsive to introducing new words. Some of those and others controlled by official bodies which may or may not represent the population are less popularity driven. In those cases a guardian relationship exists where words are vetting by others. English is vetted by all.
    • coliveira 6y ago
      That's not true at all, this process doesn't happen just in the English language. Most languages evolve the same way, new words are introduced to the lexicon through the spoken language, newspapers and books, and later added to dictionaries. For example, in German the Duden is printed every five years with new recent words added. The same in happens in other countries where academics create new vocabularies based on current usage.
  • ivanhoe 6y ago
    > or a thinly veiled claim that other languages are perhaps "less democratic" They are exactly that, less democratic, as the language standard is dictated by a committee of academics/politicians, leading to it often diverging significantly from the spoken language. In the most extreme cases language ends up used for the political purposes - for instance in my home country once known as Yugoslavia, following the break out of the federal entities into the new independent countries, there was a big push for separating each dialect of more-or-less common language spoken on the most of the territory into declaratively separate languages in order to backup the whole new politics of separate national countries and to deepen the gap between the new countries. So now we have 4 languages that are in spoken version basically the same, but standard languages differ.
    • coliveira 6y ago
      This is exactly the opposite. English is spoken in different ways across the world, however its written version is dictated by the media of the main countries UK and USA. The way English is managed is as an archaic written language that doesn't take into consideration the way people speak it.
    • fpig 6y ago
      > So now we have 4 languages that are in spoken version basically the same, but standard languages differ. It's actually the other way around, the standard languages are very similar, but spoken language differs greatly, even between different areas of one country, to the extent of not being mutually intelligible.
  • ravi-delia 6y ago
    The problem comes from the body not representing the will of the people. Obviously if some tyrannical standards board made malicious standards no one would actually feel any need to obey, but then of course that's the inherent problem of language standards boards. Either the board simply describes what's already said, or it doesn't, and either way it's useless.
• LatteLazy 6y ago
  You could easily keep the democratic nature of English use but standardise (and more importantly rationalise) the spelling.
  • grawprog 6y ago
    Standardize to what though? Personally I like spelling colour, humour etc. with a 'u', pronouncing 'z' like zed. Which standard do we use? I mean, British, American and Canadian English, to use three big ones, all use different spellings and pronounciations for different words. I personally, would not be happy having to standardize to either American or British English and I doubt Americans or British would be happy standardizing to the others. And that's not even getting into all the other English variations out there.
    • LatteLazy 6y ago
      I think the idea here isn't that we all need to use/not-use "u" in colour or z in - ize. That makes no actual difference to someone trying to spell a word they can say or say a work they're reading. The point here is that for many words in English, there is no actual link between the letters in the spelling and the sounds in the spoken word. I've been learning German for a few years. The spelling is easy. I spell 90% of words right first try. If I hear a word I can spell it well enough to look it up in a dictionary and learn what it means. The opposite is true in English. Does a word have "ie" or "ei" in it? There is no way to know. Does a work starting with an "n" have a silent "k" in front (or worse, words like honest that start with an "o" sound but are spelt with an h)? No way to know. Does a word end -ite or - ight? No way to know. There are a lot of surprise complexities that serve a purpose (when you have 2+ words with the same pronunciation but different spellings) or that are just sytlistic (colour vs color). I don't object to that. But we should stop pretending you can spell out words or that written and spoken words are linked, at least 25% of the time they're not. Just look at that last sentence: there is no W in written and no L in should. No wonder kids struggle with this crap.
      • Izkata 6y ago
        > The opposite is true in English. Does a word have "ie" or "ei" in it? There is no way to know. They may be complicated, but rules exist, and I find it interesting this was the first example you jumped to - there's a rhyme we're taught as kids that works the majority of the time: "'i' before 'e' except after 'c', or when sounded like 'a' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh'".
• coliveira 6y ago
  That's a straw man. In other languages the rules are also defined by usage. Nobody institutes changes in a language just for the sake of adding new features, like we do in software. The difference is that countries speaking the language agreed on setting common rules, with the goal of making official what is already becoming standard by daily use. Without such an agreement, there will always be some small area that wants to stick to old rules, making communication harder for everyone.
  • canjobear 6y ago
    Au contraire, the French academy loves to change the language for purely subjective/aesthetic reasons in ways that strongly differ from common usage.
    • mfcl 6y ago
      It can happen, but it's pretty rare. And when it happens nothing changes because no one cares.
  • BurningFrog 6y ago
    So what kind of rules do these allegedly successfully language regulating countries enforce?
    • ricw 6y ago
      for one, they would agree on one version of how to write standardize. It's primarily about spelling, and sentence cases, constructs etc. It typically adapts to the language, not the other way around.
      • BurningFrog 6y ago
        Ok. To me, spelling is more of a storage format for language. Not really the language itself. That makes trying to regulate it more reasonable.
  • ordu 6y ago