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My teacher used to argue that modern English would have been better off taking the Chinese writing system rather than the Roman one. The way it works now you ha
by gampleman 3y ago
My teacher used to argue that modern English would have been better off taking the Chinese writing system rather than the Roman one. The way it works now you have all the drawbacks (i.e. you need to memorise a whole lot of pronunciation) but none of the benefit (i.e. faster reading speeds, more compact representation).
- TheGigaChad 3y ago[dead]
- Scarblac 3y agoRather than going to that extreme, English spelling could be made easier. My native language is Dutch. For Dutch there are spelling reforms every so many years. English is still using Shakespeare's spelling, I think. The advantage of spelling reforms is that spelling can stay much closer to how a word is pronounced, and that it's much more standardized. The disadvantage is that older texts become hard to read much sooner. It's amazing how English from the 19th century (like _Three Men In A Boat_) is effortlessly readable, whereas Dutch from before WW2 is noticeably old.
- bonoboTP 3y agoEnglish is spread out all over the globe with no mechanism to coordinate such a reform.
- FooBarWidget 3y ago> The advantage of spelling reforms is that spelling can stay much closer to how a word is pronounced Is that so? I'm pretty sure everybody pronounces pannenkoek as pannekoek. Don't get me started on conjugation of loanwords such as "gedeleteted" (I hope I got that one right)
- eesmith 3y ago> English is still using Shakespeare's spelling, I think. The UK uses a form of written English based on Samuel Johnson's dictionary. The US uses a form of written English based on Webster's dictionary. Both Johnson's and Webster's spelling reforms post-date Shakespeare. For example, Shakespeare's grave contains the inscription: GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE, TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE: BLESTE BE Ye [the] MAN Yt [that] SPARES THES STONES, AND CURST BE HE Yt [that] MOVES MY BONES. (The "Y" is a form of the thorn symbol "þ", which Early Modern English used to represent the "Th" sound. The terms in [brackets] show the modern form.) You can see we are not using English spelling from Shakespeare's time.
- dathinab 3y agopart of this comes from a fun little stupid historic coincidence 1. the writing of English was (let's call it) standardized 2. not long after (in historic terms) society decided to majorly shift/change pronunciation of a good part but not all of the language => so now part of the language fit's it's spelling, and part is shifted away from it in various degrees By re-fitting the spelling to match the pronunciation it could be mostly fixed. That just is sadly not really doable.
- stephen_g 3y agoSince we’re talking about language, and perhaps a bit of pedantry is more justified than it would usually be, just a heads up - neither of the apostrophes in “so now part of the language fit's it's spelling” should be there!
- raincole 3y agoNo, modern English would have been better off taking, uh, almost any other European language's spelling system.
- bluGill 3y agoNo other language has exactly the same systems of sounds and so we wouldn't really be better off. Now the ideas could fit. We could add 30 more letters and then assign each letter a unique sound. We could make longer sequences of letters be one sound and each sound have one unique sequence of letters. We could adopt some accents on each letter to indicate which sound it represents. (Those are the 3 answers I know of from Europe, though they are sometiems combined. There may be other options I don't know of) however it still needs to be unique to English. Though we could agree with the other language on where to start and add sounds that they agree.to use out changes if they ever adopt.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThe simplest way to use the alphabet is to do it like Spanish does: It is purely phonetic so you write the way you pronunce and you read the way it is written. Simple. That's how they end up with "fútbol" for "football": That's how it's pronunced in Spanish so that's how they spell it, and anyone can immediately read it as well. Meanwhile in French... 'taon', 'tant', 'temps', 'tends' all pronunced exactly the same because French loves silent letters.
- the_gipsy 3y agoHave you ever heard of someone tying a cow onto a car's roof rack? Sadly, it doesn't go the other way 'round. Also, "fútbol", but also abominations like "güisqui". The frontier between "proper foreign names" and "imported massacred names" is very blurry: You can't import/massacre every foreign name, or else any moderately modern text would read like a clown show.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoIt's not an 'abomination' at all, it's a phonetic transcription within the language. You could argue that writing "whisky" in a Spanish sentence would equally be an abomination. The letter 'w' is not even a standard latin letter but was created much letter to transcribe Anglo-Saxon sounds in English.
- the_gipsy 3y agoIt's something that would make sense centuries ago. Nowadays it's just awkward/annoying/pointless that there are a handful exceptions finger-appointed by the RAE, and everything else is treated like a proper/foreign name.
- karatinversion 3y agoI think we would get used to it pretty quickly if it was adopted into English. No one thinks that we should write about Αθήνα or Владимир Путин or 東京都 in English, either.
- 3y ago
- tgv 3y agoYour teacher might have overlooked the simple fact that English has taken the planet by storm. That's how hard it is. It's not the superficial, shower-thought ideas that determine the practical ease of use, and they shouldn't be used to guide linguistic changes.
- gampleman 3y agoA language taking over usage has little to do with its qualities, but rather with the cultural domination practiced by its native speakers. English has some notably easy parts and some notably difficult parts. It's a language with remarkably simple grammar, but the orthography is notorious (see OP) as well as the very large vocabulary makes it difficult to master (although of course a high ceiling in a language isn't too much of a problem if you want your language to spread easily, as long as the floor is low).
- tgv 3y ago> as long as the floor is low All languages of highly developed cultures are equally complex, but English is definitely one that gives new learners a leg up. Its orthography is inconsistent, but we don't read through phonetic transcription. Chinese, OTOH, makes the start as a second language difficult, in all aspects.
- TheDong 3y agoEnglish took over the world, yes, but it's hard to really determine that it's due to ease of use. The obvious reasons to me that English took over the world are because the British Empire forcibly killed other languages (often literally), and then the US's global financial and cultural influence aided it further. I don't think it's due to English that Britain and the US had such vast linguistic influence, and just as easily if the British spoke a different language, that would be the lingua franca. In short, there are too many factors in reality to really be able to say "so many people speak english, so obviously it's easy". No, rather, we can observe many people speak english, and perhaps that's because the internet and TV are dominated by english due to tech and hollywood, perhaps it's because the britsh rolled high on the "slavery and racism" stats a long time ago, and perhaps it's because it's easy to learn. My money's not on "easy to learn" being a leading reason there though.