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Just an observation from an educational outsider. In the 1970s I was a US peace corps volunteer in one of the more impoverished rural counties in South Korea. M

Just an observation from an educational outsider. In the 1970s I was a US peace corps volunteer in one of the more impoverished rural counties in South Korea. My job in a health center required learning and using the Korean language. The grammar (with complicated speech levels, etc.) is daunting, but the alphabet remarkably rational and easy to learn. Even in remote villages with a rudimentary standard of living, I never encountered an illiterate person and never heard of a student who could not read. The fabled Korean obsession with education is surely important, but I do believe the sheer ease and clarity of the Korean alphabet plays an important role in universal literacy there. A lesson for English speakers?

mcpackieh 3y ago
Is the lesson that we should switch to Korean? English may not be ideally 'designed' but how would you change how English is written without causing havoc for the billions of people who already learned it?
- tatrajim 3y ago
  No, far from it. My point is that the Korean alphabet (essentially 24 symbols, arranged into syllables) is easy enough to learn in a day or two, so that clueless foreigners, such as me, can begin to sound out road signs and menus quickly, without a clue usually to what it means. By contrast, the disconnect between the Roman alphabet and the English sounds it encodes is a mess. We need a more rational alphabet tailored directly to English phonemes.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    > We need a more rational alphabet tailored directly to English phonemes. That would cause absolute havok for the billions of people who already know how to read English, but realistically you could never roll this out to the whole world... it would just become another teaching fad that cripples the kids subjected to it, by failing to teach them how to read English as the rest of the world writes it. You would be teaching kids to read and write using a system their own parents can't comprehend. It would be an absolute disaster.
    - tatrajim 3y ago
      You have a solid point, grounded in realism, and one very reminiscent of the U.S. tax system, embracing many hundreds of forms and requiring countless hours for filers to spend poring over obscure rules ("so I can rent out my house two weeks a year tax free?"), vs. the Hong Kong one-page and done tax reporting system. "It's just the way we do things in America." A parallel policy, for reference, would be the decision by China in the 1950s to adopt a simplified system of Chinese characters (the so-called 简体字), breaking with millennia of tradition. Now, most of the world learns (to my private despair) the simplified system when studying Chinese. Billions of hours cumulatively saved in learning and writing the complexities of the older 繁體字. Foolish China. And, I presume that being a traditionalist you eschew the crippling changes to American spelling of the past and use only "colour", "centre", and "theatre"? The horror of it all. And, one must also note, it's "havoc", not "havok", which is the rational, and hence forbidden, spelling
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        Here's realism: There is no authoritarian communist party of the English speaking world which may impose the kind of reform you proposed, so your idea is thankfully dead on arrival. You clearly covet that kind of power though, which is disturbing. If the scope of the change you're proposing is limited to petty changes like color to colour or vice versa, then I'm confident that your changes would be ineffectual at improving literacy rates. There is no evidence that one spelling or the other is easier for children to learn. But petty inconsequential changes like that are not what you're actually after. I think that you, with your obvious admiration for murderous authoritarian regimes and grandstanding against tradition, want to make 'traditional English' unintelligible to people who are only taught your new English. In this way you might hope to build a wall between young people and literature and other cultural materials from the past. Another Cultural Revolution is what you want, right? Tear down all that is old, purge society of traditional culture and probably murder millions of people along the way. Just as the CCP did. 枪杆子里面出政权 You admire and covet this kind of power, I can tell. Your little off topic mini-rant about tax policy tells me that you are not merely a would-be language reformer, but temporarily embarrassed head of state as well. Why not tell us about your agricultural policy too? I'm sure that somehow relates to the discussion just as tax policy does. Let me guess, step one is killing all the sparrows who eat our seeds. You attribute to me a wish to forbid certain spellings, but which of us truly has this wish? Me, who has nothing but apathetic tolerance for the differences between American English and British English? Or you, who wishes to impose harebrained reform on the entire English speaking world and shamelessly uses the CCP as your model for how this might be done? The English language will continue to change over time, as it always has, as all languages do naturally. What will not ever happen is a new system of writing being imposed on the entire English speaking world by fiat. Even if you became Supreme Leader of the People's Republic of America and forced your new system on the entire country, you would be dismayed to find that the overwhelming majority of English speakers do not live in America, nor any other single country. There is no single central authority for the English language, no governing body to capture. Imposing reform like you suggest is literally impossible so your proposal is beyond worthless. English is used by too many people in too many countries, you can't conqueror and subjugate them all.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    The words to describe what you want are "Orthographic reform". There will be no further English orthographic reform. The last successful reform was Webster in the 19th century. Webster didn't make drastic changes, yet he's why Americans and British people spell words differently centuries later. Changes to orthography are much harder once you have printing and then again once you have mass literacy, because now your Flag Day applies to literally all of the humans who use the affected language, and humans hate change. They'd probably lynch you, except that you can't succeed so they needn't bother.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - School-Cotton 3y ago
      There have been many successful orthographic reforms in many languages, including recently (1996 for German). It probably can’t succeed in English, because no English-speaking country has any culture or history of state language regulation, and even if they did, it’d be tough to get them all to cooperate. Also, the most powerful English-speaking country is unable to meaningfully reform anything because of its deadlocked and hyper-polarized political system. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible in general. For German only Germany, Austria and Switzerland had to agree, all of which, unlike the US, have normally functioning political and administrative systems.
lulu22ro 3y ago
My son (7) is going to a bilingual school and he is currently learning how to read. Both German and Romanian had pretty standardised implementations of the Latin alphabet. He learned pretty fast that we sound out the S in German but not in Romanian, and that sometimes he needs 3 letters for a sound, while the other language only needs one. His two languages come with different rules, but there are very very few exceptions. I am really curious how a child from an English-French speaking family fares in school, given that both languages take such a "historical" approach to spelling.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

mcpackieh 3y ago

Is the lesson that we should switch to Korean? English may not be ideally 'designed' but how would you change how English is written without causing havoc for the billions of people who already learned it?

tatrajim 3y ago
No, far from it. My point is that the Korean alphabet (essentially 24 symbols, arranged into syllables) is easy enough to learn in a day or two, so that clueless foreigners, such as me, can begin to sound out road signs and menus quickly, without a clue usually to what it means. By contrast, the disconnect between the Roman alphabet and the English sounds it encodes is a mess. We need a more rational alphabet tailored directly to English phonemes.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > We need a more rational alphabet tailored directly to English phonemes. That would cause absolute havok for the billions of people who already know how to read English, but realistically you could never roll this out to the whole world... it would just become another teaching fad that cripples the kids subjected to it, by failing to teach them how to read English as the rest of the world writes it. You would be teaching kids to read and write using a system their own parents can't comprehend. It would be an absolute disaster.
  - tatrajim 3y ago
    You have a solid point, grounded in realism, and one very reminiscent of the U.S. tax system, embracing many hundreds of forms and requiring countless hours for filers to spend poring over obscure rules ("so I can rent out my house two weeks a year tax free?"), vs. the Hong Kong one-page and done tax reporting system. "It's just the way we do things in America." A parallel policy, for reference, would be the decision by China in the 1950s to adopt a simplified system of Chinese characters (the so-called 简体字), breaking with millennia of tradition. Now, most of the world learns (to my private despair) the simplified system when studying Chinese. Billions of hours cumulatively saved in learning and writing the complexities of the older 繁體字. Foolish China. And, I presume that being a traditionalist you eschew the crippling changes to American spelling of the past and use only "colour", "centre", and "theatre"? The horror of it all. And, one must also note, it's "havoc", not "havok", which is the rational, and hence forbidden, spelling
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Here's realism: There is no authoritarian communist party of the English speaking world which may impose the kind of reform you proposed, so your idea is thankfully dead on arrival. You clearly covet that kind of power though, which is disturbing. If the scope of the change you're proposing is limited to petty changes like color to colour or vice versa, then I'm confident that your changes would be ineffectual at improving literacy rates. There is no evidence that one spelling or the other is easier for children to learn. But petty inconsequential changes like that are not what you're actually after. I think that you, with your obvious admiration for murderous authoritarian regimes and grandstanding against tradition, want to make 'traditional English' unintelligible to people who are only taught your new English. In this way you might hope to build a wall between young people and literature and other cultural materials from the past. Another Cultural Revolution is what you want, right? Tear down all that is old, purge society of traditional culture and probably murder millions of people along the way. Just as the CCP did. 枪杆子里面出政权 You admire and covet this kind of power, I can tell. Your little off topic mini-rant about tax policy tells me that you are not merely a would-be language reformer, but temporarily embarrassed head of state as well. Why not tell us about your agricultural policy too? I'm sure that somehow relates to the discussion just as tax policy does. Let me guess, step one is killing all the sparrows who eat our seeds. You attribute to me a wish to forbid certain spellings, but which of us truly has this wish? Me, who has nothing but apathetic tolerance for the differences between American English and British English? Or you, who wishes to impose harebrained reform on the entire English speaking world and shamelessly uses the CCP as your model for how this might be done? The English language will continue to change over time, as it always has, as all languages do naturally. What will not ever happen is a new system of writing being imposed on the entire English speaking world by fiat. Even if you became Supreme Leader of the People's Republic of America and forced your new system on the entire country, you would be dismayed to find that the overwhelming majority of English speakers do not live in America, nor any other single country. There is no single central authority for the English language, no governing body to capture. Imposing reform like you suggest is literally impossible so your proposal is beyond worthless. English is used by too many people in too many countries, you can't conqueror and subjugate them all.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  The words to describe what you want are "Orthographic reform". There will be no further English orthographic reform. The last successful reform was Webster in the 19th century. Webster didn't make drastic changes, yet he's why Americans and British people spell words differently centuries later. Changes to orthography are much harder once you have printing and then again once you have mass literacy, because now your Flag Day applies to literally all of the humans who use the affected language, and humans hate change. They'd probably lynch you, except that you can't succeed so they needn't bother.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    There have been many successful orthographic reforms in many languages, including recently (1996 for German). It probably can’t succeed in English, because no English-speaking country has any culture or history of state language regulation, and even if they did, it’d be tough to get them all to cooperate. Also, the most powerful English-speaking country is unable to meaningfully reform anything because of its deadlocked and hyper-polarized political system. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible in general. For German only Germany, Austria and Switzerland had to agree, all of which, unlike the US, have normally functioning political and administrative systems.

lulu22ro 3y ago

My son (7) is going to a bilingual school and he is currently learning how to read. Both German and Romanian had pretty standardised implementations of the Latin alphabet. He learned pretty fast that we sound out the S in German but not in Romanian, and that sometimes he needs 3 letters for a sound, while the other language only needs one. His two languages come with different rules, but there are very very few exceptions. I am really curious how a child from an English-French speaking family fares in school, given that both languages take such a "historical" approach to spelling.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]