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Whoa, as the Brits say "Honi soit qui mal y pense"! Your hermeneutic skills seem a mite lacking today. Did you miss my ironic comment on the PRC imposition of

Whoa, as the Brits say "Honi soit qui mal y pense"! Your hermeneutic skills seem a mite lacking today. Did you miss my ironic comment on the PRC imposition of simplified characters: "to my private despair"? I do loathe them and salute Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong for resisting their use. Then, too, PRC Chinese pinyin (Chang -> Zhang, Chin -> Qin etc) is especially ugly. Nevertheless, it's hard to deny that English spelling is slowly trudging to the point, where almost no one, including PhDs, can reliably write sustained prose without a spell checker. Hence all the internet use of U, gud, watsup, gimme, etc. etc. It's not the case for other languages that writing is so out of synch with pronunciation. Koreans can learn to read years faster because their alphabet fits the language around them. In your world, it would seem (correct me if I'm wrong) that you shrug your shoulders and tell the children, "hey, just grit your teeth and learn this clunky writing system that will scar many of you for life as too stupid to read or spell, all the people out there in the world demand you pay the price, while they whiz ahead with their easy systems". I'm dubious of almost all invocations of "structural racism", but this might be an exception.

mcpackieh 3y ago
You claim the PRC's imposed language changes are "to your private despair" as you publicly extol the supposed practical virtue of what they did and hold it up as a model for what you'd like done to English. You offer up token criticism of what the PRC did then lead immediately into "Nevertheless..." praise for the supposed benefits of what they did. I have seen this manner of duplicitous authoritarian apologia many times before, you aren't half as clever as you think. Far from making things easier for children, you aim to make it far harder for them to access their cultural heritage by deliberately neglecting to teach them the language skills needed to access all extant English literature. I don't believe for an instant that this has escaped your consideration. You wish to deface the past so you can rewrite history; it's a form of book burning. And structural racism? I guarantee you that any English speaking family with the means to do so would have their children privately taught to read traditional modern English, even if they had to do it themselves personally. You would create an underclass of quasi-literate English speakers, how is that supposed to address structural inequality? What you propose is not intended to promote equality, drop the bullshit.
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- tatrajim 3y ago
  Thou dost maketh a most excellent argument, yet methinks thou mightst have carried thy reason to its just termination. The grandeur of the English tongue did attain its apogee in the time of Shakespeare; therefore, 'tis meet that we should converse and pen our words in the idiom of that age, rather than employ the clumsy, degenerate form that hath dwindled through the succeeding years.
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mcpackieh 3y ago

You claim the PRC's imposed language changes are "to your private despair" as you publicly extol the supposed practical virtue of what they did and hold it up as a model for what you'd like done to English. You offer up token criticism of what the PRC did then lead immediately into "Nevertheless..." praise for the supposed benefits of what they did. I have seen this manner of duplicitous authoritarian apologia many times before, you aren't half as clever as you think. Far from making things easier for children, you aim to make it far harder for them to access their cultural heritage by deliberately neglecting to teach them the language skills needed to access all extant English literature. I don't believe for an instant that this has escaped your consideration. You wish to deface the past so you can rewrite history; it's a form of book burning. And structural racism? I guarantee you that any English speaking family with the means to do so would have their children privately taught to read traditional modern English, even if they had to do it themselves personally. You would create an underclass of quasi-literate English speakers, how is that supposed to address structural inequality? What you propose is not intended to promote equality, drop the bullshit.

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tatrajim 3y ago
Thou dost maketh a most excellent argument, yet methinks thou mightst have carried thy reason to its just termination. The grandeur of the English tongue did attain its apogee in the time of Shakespeare; therefore, 'tis meet that we should converse and pen our words in the idiom of that age, rather than employ the clumsy, degenerate form that hath dwindled through the succeeding years.
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