4 ms·

One of the things that blew my mind when I took a few semesters of Dutch in college is that the language occasionally gets amended (or more precisely, the way i

by saghm 2y ago

One of the things that blew my mind when I took a few semesters of Dutch in college is that the language occasionally gets amended (or more precisely, the way it's taught in schools is amended, although after a generation or two of delay the effects are the same) to fix inconsistencies. I can't remember if clarifying 'ij' and 'y' was one of those, but I remember the professor telling us about how a while back people were upset when they updated the spelling of the word "pannenkoek" (which I think had previously been spelled "pannekoek"), which some people apparently still haven't gotten over after almost three decades[1]. I wish there were enough willpower for something similar for English, but it's probably too late to reach any sort of compromise on whether to use a "u" in words like "color"/"colour". [1]: https://dutchreview.com/news/dutch-government-argue-over-spelling-of-pancake/ https://dutchreview.com/news/dutch-government-argue-over-spe...

moi2388 2y ago
Yes, you are correct. It’s updated in something called “The green book”, new versions got published in 1954 - 1995 - 2005 - 2015. So for the people having learnt the language before 1995 (like myself), had the rules change 2.5 times (the last one was a minor actualisation). Which means that most of the intuitions you developed are wrong, and people spelling words differently depending on their age. This was quite confusing for me as a kid haha
prerok 2y ago
Well, I think the difference is that for Dutch, people are mostly colocated, i.e. share the same space and have a national curriculum to guide the use. For English, it's quite different because many countries list it as their official language but may have diverged spellings and meanings and there is no single body to direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US vs. British English and the u in colo(u)r is a mere spelling example. Consider surgery or elevator, which are bigger discrepancies. I remember from my school days, as a non-native speaker, these were much more troublesome and we had a special test just to check we could tell which is which in US and GB English.
- daniel-s 2y ago
  I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy. English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works and who decides what the correct anything for the language is. The closest are style guides, but they come from multiple organisations and each often different to each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something will be spelt differently.
  - prerok 2y ago
    Indeed, that was what I was trying to say, but you put it more accurately. Thanks!
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. English had multiple attempted spelling reforms, but that mostly resulted in differences between American and British spellings of the same words. There was no central power to enforce a single English spelling because America had successfully broken off from the British Empire whose coercive force backed the English language. In contrast, France was extremely good at putting down revolutionaries in their colonies. Even when they gained nominal independence France would invent debts to impoverish their former colonies. France was also extremely good at putting down local languages, even within France itself. France waged a century-long campaign to hunt its own minority languages to extinction[0] and the language regulators are themselves part of the same infrastructure. In other words, "regular spelling" is a colonial atrocity and English's incomprehensible spelling rules are a demonstration of freedom. This can even be demonstrated in each language's attitude towards loanwords. English stole huge swaths of Latin, Greek, and French vocabulary. Text even a few centuries old is difficult to read and anything older than Shakespeare is completely inscrutable[1] as there's too many Germanic root words for this ostensibly Germanic language. Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped. Well, I suppose there is one reason why you'd want to stop it: loanwords make it far harder to regularize spelling. Think about, say, all the Japanese loanwords in English. Hepburn romanization[2] tried to make them readable to English speakers, but didn't do a great job, so now English has to accommodate spellings like karaoke, tsundere, or sakura alongside spellings like pleonasm, beef, or Olympic. Good luck inventing a spelling system that can both faithfully represent the "correct" sounds for all of those words, while also remaining legible to present English readers, and being adopted in every country that speaks English to some degree - off the top of my head that includes America, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, and South Africa. [0] Which I suspect may have also inspired analogous atrocities in Canada against indigenous Canadians [1] As I put it to a native Japanese speaker: "You can read Genji, I can't read Beowolf." [2] Which itself isn't used by native speakers since you can't round-trip Hepburn to Romaji. Japan itself uses Kunrei-shiki romanization, it's the one that spells つ as tu instead of tsu.
retrac 2y ago
The French do something similar, as do the Germans. They've had relatively little luck with substantial changes recently, though. The 1990 French reforms were rather trivial. For example. the placement of the diaeresis was shifted to the first vowel in some digraphs. So "aiguë" (acute, sharp) is now "aigüe" since it is two syllables, but the former spelling misleadingly hints at three syllables. That one seems to have been well-accepted. Many of the other reforms have been only partially accepted, or explicitly rejected by many speakers. (I don't think I am ever going to get used to "ognon" for onion.)
bobthepanda 2y ago
The thing is that with all the regional Englishes and their pronunciations it would be basically impossible to settle on a consistent phonetic spelling.
- gpvos 2y ago
  Dutch has an amazing variety of dialects. Strong dialect speakers from the southwest and northeast corners of the language area will not be able to understand each others dialects.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    there's only one prestige Dutch dialect though whereas English has multiple prestige regional dialects. It would be like if Dutch and Afrikaans had to agree on spellings.
    - seszett 2y ago
      > there's only one prestige Dutch dialect though Which one would that be? AN which nobody actually uses (at least here in Flanders)? I don't know much about how it works within the Netherlands but within Belgium at least the Dutch accent gives you no prestige at all. I would expect the reverse to be true in the Netherlands (whichever accent one would choose to represent the Flemish) since the Dutch sometimes don't even recognise Flemish speakers as native Dutch speakers and answer in English instead. Afrikaans is a related but separate language. Suriname, as the third Dutch speaking country, does use the same spellings as Belgium and the Netherlands.
      - bobthepanda 2y ago
        “Prestige” dialect is the term in linguistics for what is the favored standard taught in schools, used in business and media broadcasts, etc. My understanding of Dutch is that Dutch media from Suriname to Belgium to NL uses the same prestige dialect. If you were to write a statement for a court, there is exactly one dialect that would be appropriate. This is not true with English, where each major English speaking region teaches its own standard of English as the standard.
Gormo 2y ago
> I wish there were enough willpower for something similar for English English tends to develop through evolution, not design. Whose willpower would we be talking about anyway?

by saghm 2y ago

moi2388 2y ago

Yes, you are correct. It’s updated in something called “The green book”, new versions got published in 1954 - 1995 - 2005 - 2015. So for the people having learnt the language before 1995 (like myself), had the rules change 2.5 times (the last one was a minor actualisation). Which means that most of the intuitions you developed are wrong, and people spelling words differently depending on their age. This was quite confusing for me as a kid haha

prerok 2y ago

Well, I think the difference is that for Dutch, people are mostly colocated, i.e. share the same space and have a national curriculum to guide the use. For English, it's quite different because many countries list it as their official language but may have diverged spellings and meanings and there is no single body to direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US vs. British English and the u in colo(u)r is a mere spelling example. Consider surgery or elevator, which are bigger discrepancies. I remember from my school days, as a non-native speaker, these were much more troublesome and we had a special test just to check we could tell which is which in US and GB English.

daniel-s 2y ago
I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy. English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works and who decides what the correct anything for the language is. The closest are style guides, but they come from multiple organisations and each often different to each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something will be spelt differently.
- prerok 2y ago
  Indeed, that was what I was trying to say, but you put it more accurately. Thanks!
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. English had multiple attempted spelling reforms, but that mostly resulted in differences between American and British spellings of the same words. There was no central power to enforce a single English spelling because America had successfully broken off from the British Empire whose coercive force backed the English language. In contrast, France was extremely good at putting down revolutionaries in their colonies. Even when they gained nominal independence France would invent debts to impoverish their former colonies. France was also extremely good at putting down local languages, even within France itself. France waged a century-long campaign to hunt its own minority languages to extinction[0] and the language regulators are themselves part of the same infrastructure. In other words, "regular spelling" is a colonial atrocity and English's incomprehensible spelling rules are a demonstration of freedom. This can even be demonstrated in each language's attitude towards loanwords. English stole huge swaths of Latin, Greek, and French vocabulary. Text even a few centuries old is difficult to read and anything older than Shakespeare is completely inscrutable[1] as there's too many Germanic root words for this ostensibly Germanic language. Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped. Well, I suppose there is one reason why you'd want to stop it: loanwords make it far harder to regularize spelling. Think about, say, all the Japanese loanwords in English. Hepburn romanization[2] tried to make them readable to English speakers, but didn't do a great job, so now English has to accommodate spellings like karaoke, tsundere, or sakura alongside spellings like pleonasm, beef, or Olympic. Good luck inventing a spelling system that can both faithfully represent the "correct" sounds for all of those words, while also remaining legible to present English readers, and being adopted in every country that speaks English to some degree - off the top of my head that includes America, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, and South Africa. [0] Which I suspect may have also inspired analogous atrocities in Canada against indigenous Canadians [1] As I put it to a native Japanese speaker: "You can read Genji, I can't read Beowolf." [2] Which itself isn't used by native speakers since you can't round-trip Hepburn to Romaji. Japan itself uses Kunrei-shiki romanization, it's the one that spells つ as tu instead of tsu.

retrac 2y ago

The French do something similar, as do the Germans. They've had relatively little luck with substantial changes recently, though. The 1990 French reforms were rather trivial. For example. the placement of the diaeresis was shifted to the first vowel in some digraphs. So "aiguë" (acute, sharp) is now "aigüe" since it is two syllables, but the former spelling misleadingly hints at three syllables. That one seems to have been well-accepted. Many of the other reforms have been only partially accepted, or explicitly rejected by many speakers. (I don't think I am ever going to get used to "ognon" for onion.)

bobthepanda 2y ago

The thing is that with all the regional Englishes and their pronunciations it would be basically impossible to settle on a consistent phonetic spelling.

gpvos 2y ago
Dutch has an amazing variety of dialects. Strong dialect speakers from the southwest and northeast corners of the language area will not be able to understand each others dialects.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  there's only one prestige Dutch dialect though whereas English has multiple prestige regional dialects. It would be like if Dutch and Afrikaans had to agree on spellings.
  - seszett 2y ago
    > there's only one prestige Dutch dialect though Which one would that be? AN which nobody actually uses (at least here in Flanders)? I don't know much about how it works within the Netherlands but within Belgium at least the Dutch accent gives you no prestige at all. I would expect the reverse to be true in the Netherlands (whichever accent one would choose to represent the Flemish) since the Dutch sometimes don't even recognise Flemish speakers as native Dutch speakers and answer in English instead. Afrikaans is a related but separate language. Suriname, as the third Dutch speaking country, does use the same spellings as Belgium and the Netherlands.
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      “Prestige” dialect is the term in linguistics for what is the favored standard taught in schools, used in business and media broadcasts, etc. My understanding of Dutch is that Dutch media from Suriname to Belgium to NL uses the same prestige dialect. If you were to write a statement for a court, there is exactly one dialect that would be appropriate. This is not true with English, where each major English speaking region teaches its own standard of English as the standard.

Gormo 2y ago

> I wish there were enough willpower for something similar for English English tends to develop through evolution, not design. Whose willpower would we be talking about anyway?