4 ms·

Excellent comment. English is hard to learn also because the alphabet doesn’t convey this complexity. In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronun

Excellent comment. English is hard to learn also because the alphabet doesn’t convey this complexity. In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronunciation of a word just from how it was written because the alphabet of those languages contain all the consonants and vowels. This isn’t the case with English. Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “default one” for the world. The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “default one” for the world. The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on. It arguably became the default international language of trade because it's so sloppy, and more precisely because the language is a mish-mash of other languages, readily borrowing words from everywhere, and this is why it seems so sloppy. Some other, highly regular language like German would never have become the international language of trade because those languages aren't sloppy, and so aren't very good for non-native speakers to use daily, and aren't products of a culture that got rich from trade. As for tiny differences in pronunciations being used to discriminate against people, try learning German and moving to Germany and see how the natives treat you. You'll always be an outsider there, because you're never going to learn the language or pronunciation to that level as an adult, and the culture is known to be pretty insular. English-speaking cultures are generally far more welcoming to immigrants and people who don't speak the language like a native, and it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade.
- gavindean90 2y ago
  I always thought that the reason English is used in international trade is that English-speaking countries have huge economic interests, both historically and currently, and have always flat-out refused to speak anything else.
  - tyre 2y ago
    Yes. Spanish isn’t widespread in the Central and South Americas because of the language, nor Portuguese in Brazil. It’s not a coincidence that stores on the Champs Élysées speak Mandarin. Languages are used because they’re useful.
- g15jv2dp 2y ago
  English becoming the "international" language for the west has nothing to do with English as a language, and everything to do with geopolitics and economics. As for being treated as an outsider, I actually moved and lived to the US for close to a year. I made tons of effort to try and speak good English. On the face of it, the locals were very appreciative - French accent is so romantic, am I right? In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    I would like to hear from someone who lived in Britain for a year, but I think British people are far more tolerant and willing to listen. (Failing to realise the L in would, should and could is silent, so would and wood are pronounced identically, is half the French accent.)
  - milch 2y ago
    > In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried. I found this quite interesting about Japan. I went on vacation there recently, and especially in more rural places many people do not speak English. I don't speak Japanese, just picking up a few words while there. The people there put an immense amount of effort trying to understand what you're saying, e.g. somehow we managed to explain to a taxi driver the location of our hotel using only some elementary words like water, station, train tracks, up/down/left/right, yes/no, please/thank you. They are also very appreciative and often find it quite funny/interesting when you try to speak Japanese, even just simple words. As another example we also had an incident where a random passerby noticed we were trying to find our way, so (I assume) he asked us where we were trying to go, and then led us to the right bus stop. IME any similar situation in the US would more likely lead to people avoiding eye contact or pretending to be busy than trying to help, certainly not proactively without being asked to
- yongjik 2y ago
  I think you reversed cause and effect. English became the world's lingua franca not because of its inherent quality, but because the British Empire once conquered the world, and then the United States took up the baton. Basically the same reason why Latin America speaks Spanish and Portuguese. It's not because the languages were "better" in some way, but because it was conquered by speakers of those languages. And a side effect of being a global language is that you will have to get used to everybody from India to Australia to Kenya speak your language. English speakers are expected to meet widely different dialects even at the most formal business meetings.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Most languages weren’t in the running. However, Spanish, French, Latin, or English could easily have become the international trade language. German was in the running for Scientific publishing etc yet somehow English won in multiple domains. And it doesn’t just win officially. I’ve seen groups without a common language default to English with people translating back and forth to other languages as needed even when more than one language was known to several members of the group. It’s not absolute, but there does seem to be an inherent advantage to English when translating across multiple languages.
    - yongjik 2y ago
      The "inherent advantage" of English is basically the same advantage of Facebook and Instagram: people use them because other people use them. When a Korean meets a Greek, chances are that neither knows each other's language but they both know English. So they converse in English.
      - Retric 2y ago
        I’ve seen groups use English even when other languages are more well known in terms of number of people or levels of fluency. Broken English works better than broken French / German. Not sure about Spanish, but something is going on beyond English winning because it was already ahead.
  - 2y ago
- lolinder 2y ago
  > it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade. Which, while I'm here geeking out about linguistics anyway, allows me to break out one of my favorite tidbits about the history of English: "Broken English" is super easy to understand in large part due to the fact that Modern English was forged as a sort of pidgin at the intersection of Old English, Scandinavian, and then French. The crazy admixture of peoples in England between 800 and 1200 meant that most of the complicated grammatical bits of the language got sanded down to the essentials. English lost grammatical gender, its full case system, noun classes (mostly), most declensions, and on and on. What replaced all that is actually a relatively simple grammatical system (on the scale of Indo-European systems) that relies a lot more on adding words than on modifying suffixes. And adding words is a game anyone can play—you may not pick the same modifiers as a native would, but you'll get your point across!
  - philwelch 2y ago
    Is this also why English has so many words? I know we doubled up on words by keeping both the Anglo-Saxon and Norman French words for the same basic concepts, but did we really be up with even more to make up for the simpler grammar?
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Probably not. Most of our words are content words, and the near-duplicates are, as you say, the result of borrowing from various other languages. These words don't serve a grammatical role and we could make do without them just fine. The words that serve to replace grammatical features that exist in other Indo-European languages are a very small subset of our words—words like "will", "may" the prepositions, and similar. Non-natives will reach for other words to substitute for these grammar words when they're unsure which grammar word to use, but I don't think that's why those other words exist.
  - garof 2y ago
    "The Year 1000" by Lacey and Danziger explains this well in slightly more detail, with some references, for anyone that would like to learn more. The other reference I have on the shelf that I will check for this is David Crystal's "The Stories of English". Any other good references out there?
- brettp 2y ago
  English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and accents. In fact people do it deliberately to distinguish themselves from other speakers of the same language (just take a look at how teenagers' language innovates). French, Spanish, and German all have huge variation in dialects and accents too. English, like many other languages learnt widely as a trade language by non-native speakers, has lost a lot of complexity, notably case system and gender. (Indonesian is perhaps the canonical example of this.) Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. It didn't become the default international language of trade due to any features of the language itself (it did that thanks to the British Empire and in particular its former colony in North America) - but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Because it is so widely spoken by so many people, it does have a large vocabulary and a lot of idioms. But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy ("put an 's' on the third person singular"), and so on.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Yes it is, and you say so yourself: >Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. >A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. Most other languages don't borrow words so profligately, and have much more regular relationships between their written form and their pronunciation. >but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Right, and that makes the language "sloppy", which was my point before. You can't have a language shared by so many different people and cultures as a common trade language and have it stay as orderly and precise as German, for example. >But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy Yes, and these features all make the language much easier for people to adopt as an international language, despite the sloppiness. I have a hard time imagining Russian or German having had this success in a parallel universe. As an example, look at Dutch: the Netherlands is another country that got rich from trade, and was also a colonial power. But who outside of the Netherlands speaks Dutch? South Africa is the only place the language actually went anywhere. Meanwhile, the former colonies of Spain all still use Spanish.
jandrewrogers 2y ago
English is a mess but the pronunciation seems to be fault tolerant. Most skilled speakers can understand people that butcher the complicated pronunciation because it is highly diverse even among native speakers that notionally speak the same dialect. I do wonder if the extreme globalization of English has distilled a robust core that is pronunciation resistant. I have noticed that international English makes word choices that limit pronunciation ambiguity.
gumby 2y ago
> In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronunciation of a word just from how it was written Some other languages. Just considering the Latin alphabet: French pronunciation is so far from spelling that spelling bees used to be (may still be) prime time television. Words in Spanish and Portuguese may be written in a deterministic fashion, yet pronounced quite differently in different countries. And sure, German spelling does reflect pronunciation…because the spelling has been changed from time to time to match shifts in pronunciation…specifically the pronunciation used by a small number of people in Niedersachsen. Elsewhere in Germany (much less Switzerland) the local pronunciation can be incomprehensible. (This was the case in the UK and France until the advent of radio and then especially TV). And that’s just four examples using basically the same alphabet. This phenomenon is common to all living languages. Even dead languages, for that matter: the Latin and (classical) Greek pronunciation I had to use in high school was a UK version different from that typically used in the USA or (based on one person I met), Sweden! And do you really think the same thing doesn’t happen with Arabic, Hindi et al? English ain’t so special.
- brettp 2y ago
  It's actually not that difficult to tell the pronunciation of a French word from its spelling - the rules are pretty consistent (much more consistent and fewer of them than English). However, it's much more difficult to guess the spelling from the pronunciation due to the number of homophones and silent letters.
xwolfi 2y ago
Hum but English has simpler features that make it easier to learn than most languages. Sure, the phonetic is hard and I'll always have an accent and people will always just guess my country at the first sentence I utter, but: - nouns have no gender !!!! - conjugation is extremely simple (only one variation for 3rd person singular for most verbs!!) - tenses are limited ! - vocabulary is 40% French-Latin and 60% Germanic, most of Europe and America can use the subset they prefer - the writing is latin, simple to learn, complete enough to describe well the sounds - the native community is immense, with a large interesting cultural body of work, making it interesting to learn - it's easy to start communicating but it can be extremely rich in higher levels of language: you start talking quickly and then can move to beautiful structures later: there is a quick reward and a long term reward There is nothing unfortunate it became default, there is simply no better lingua franca today. We could try Japanese or Chinese, Hindi or Spanish, but they all have way more quirks and way less qualities ! I strongly reject people saying that English became default by historical chance, it could have stayed French, moved to German or Spanish, it SHOULD be Chinese, but all of them are too hard for adults to learn as quickly as English and never as rewarding. Just think of the time it takes to learn an ideogram-based writing system, all that to end up able to read only communist propaganda or very old poetry for instance...
- brettp 2y ago
  Arguably English became the default by a very large historical chance: that Napoleon sold off his North American colonies - a huge swathe of what is now the United States - to finance his wars in Europe. At the same time that both France and England were sniffing around Australia, France again was distracted by its wars. Both the United States and Australia could very easily have been French speaking, and if they had been, I suggest we'd be having this discussion sur internet en français
  - xwolfi 2y ago
    Sure maybe, but French, my native language btw, is inherently more complex, less rich in vocabulary, idiosyncratic in its habit to follow latin in writing but deviating from it in spoken form, it's just not as good as English so we're quite lucky at least. I feel it's hard for me to make spelling mistakes in English, which is not my native tongue, but VERY EASY to make them in French, that I studied and used for decades: there is an inherent beauty to English, in its simplicity, we should not dismiss. (yes I'm re-reading three times to make sure I didn't spell anything wrong lol)
sersi 2y ago
> The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on. I speak a few languages (French, English, Japanese, German, Spanish, Chinese), some fluently, some less so and, honestly, in all of these languages, I can use tiny differences to other people based on social status, geography etc... It's easy in Mandarin despite me not being able to speak it that well. Japanese has a lot of variation between regions. I can quickly tell the level of education of someone speaking French (my native language) as well as guess where they're likely to be from, etc... I don't think that English is any different from any other languages on those points.
euroderf 2y ago
Agreed. For so many words in common usage, English spelling (vis-à-vis pronunciation) is aggressively misleading, deceptive, pain-inducing. In the grand scheme of things, it's unfortunate that English lazily conquered the internet without any kind of preventive maintenance rooted in critical thinking. It's not nutty (maybe just futile) to argue that English desperately needs fixing. The distributed nature of English should be encouraging for experimentation. Most native English speakers just roll over and succumb to Stockholm Syndrome. Every would-be/aspiring spelling reformer has mentally composed a manifesto of righteousness.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  If you want to reform spelling of English words, the thing to do is to start. There's no one to make a prescriptive mandate, and it anyway wouldn't work.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    Distributed means opt-in only. Which means naming & categorizing & organizing.

shiroiushi 2y ago

>Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “default one” for the world. The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on. It arguably became the default international language of trade because it's so sloppy, and more precisely because the language is a mish-mash of other languages, readily borrowing words from everywhere, and this is why it seems so sloppy. Some other, highly regular language like German would never have become the international language of trade because those languages aren't sloppy, and so aren't very good for non-native speakers to use daily, and aren't products of a culture that got rich from trade. As for tiny differences in pronunciations being used to discriminate against people, try learning German and moving to Germany and see how the natives treat you. You'll always be an outsider there, because you're never going to learn the language or pronunciation to that level as an adult, and the culture is known to be pretty insular. English-speaking cultures are generally far more welcoming to immigrants and people who don't speak the language like a native, and it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade.

gavindean90 2y ago
I always thought that the reason English is used in international trade is that English-speaking countries have huge economic interests, both historically and currently, and have always flat-out refused to speak anything else.
- tyre 2y ago
  Yes. Spanish isn’t widespread in the Central and South Americas because of the language, nor Portuguese in Brazil. It’s not a coincidence that stores on the Champs Élysées speak Mandarin. Languages are used because they’re useful.
g15jv2dp 2y ago
English becoming the "international" language for the west has nothing to do with English as a language, and everything to do with geopolitics and economics. As for being treated as an outsider, I actually moved and lived to the US for close to a year. I made tons of effort to try and speak good English. On the face of it, the locals were very appreciative - French accent is so romantic, am I right? In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  I would like to hear from someone who lived in Britain for a year, but I think British people are far more tolerant and willing to listen. (Failing to realise the L in would, should and could is silent, so would and wood are pronounced identically, is half the French accent.)
- milch 2y ago
  > In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried. I found this quite interesting about Japan. I went on vacation there recently, and especially in more rural places many people do not speak English. I don't speak Japanese, just picking up a few words while there. The people there put an immense amount of effort trying to understand what you're saying, e.g. somehow we managed to explain to a taxi driver the location of our hotel using only some elementary words like water, station, train tracks, up/down/left/right, yes/no, please/thank you. They are also very appreciative and often find it quite funny/interesting when you try to speak Japanese, even just simple words. As another example we also had an incident where a random passerby noticed we were trying to find our way, so (I assume) he asked us where we were trying to go, and then led us to the right bus stop. IME any similar situation in the US would more likely lead to people avoiding eye contact or pretending to be busy than trying to help, certainly not proactively without being asked to
yongjik 2y ago
I think you reversed cause and effect. English became the world's lingua franca not because of its inherent quality, but because the British Empire once conquered the world, and then the United States took up the baton. Basically the same reason why Latin America speaks Spanish and Portuguese. It's not because the languages were "better" in some way, but because it was conquered by speakers of those languages. And a side effect of being a global language is that you will have to get used to everybody from India to Australia to Kenya speak your language. English speakers are expected to meet widely different dialects even at the most formal business meetings.
- Retric 2y ago
  Most languages weren’t in the running. However, Spanish, French, Latin, or English could easily have become the international trade language. German was in the running for Scientific publishing etc yet somehow English won in multiple domains. And it doesn’t just win officially. I’ve seen groups without a common language default to English with people translating back and forth to other languages as needed even when more than one language was known to several members of the group. It’s not absolute, but there does seem to be an inherent advantage to English when translating across multiple languages.
  - yongjik 2y ago
    The "inherent advantage" of English is basically the same advantage of Facebook and Instagram: people use them because other people use them. When a Korean meets a Greek, chances are that neither knows each other's language but they both know English. So they converse in English.
    - Retric 2y ago
      I’ve seen groups use English even when other languages are more well known in terms of number of people or levels of fluency. Broken English works better than broken French / German. Not sure about Spanish, but something is going on beyond English winning because it was already ahead.
- 2y ago
lolinder 2y ago
> it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade. Which, while I'm here geeking out about linguistics anyway, allows me to break out one of my favorite tidbits about the history of English: "Broken English" is super easy to understand in large part due to the fact that Modern English was forged as a sort of pidgin at the intersection of Old English, Scandinavian, and then French. The crazy admixture of peoples in England between 800 and 1200 meant that most of the complicated grammatical bits of the language got sanded down to the essentials. English lost grammatical gender, its full case system, noun classes (mostly), most declensions, and on and on. What replaced all that is actually a relatively simple grammatical system (on the scale of Indo-European systems) that relies a lot more on adding words than on modifying suffixes. And adding words is a game anyone can play—you may not pick the same modifiers as a native would, but you'll get your point across!
- philwelch 2y ago
  Is this also why English has so many words? I know we doubled up on words by keeping both the Anglo-Saxon and Norman French words for the same basic concepts, but did we really be up with even more to make up for the simpler grammar?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Probably not. Most of our words are content words, and the near-duplicates are, as you say, the result of borrowing from various other languages. These words don't serve a grammatical role and we could make do without them just fine. The words that serve to replace grammatical features that exist in other Indo-European languages are a very small subset of our words—words like "will", "may" the prepositions, and similar. Non-natives will reach for other words to substitute for these grammar words when they're unsure which grammar word to use, but I don't think that's why those other words exist.
- garof 2y ago
  "The Year 1000" by Lacey and Danziger explains this well in slightly more detail, with some references, for anyone that would like to learn more. The other reference I have on the shelf that I will check for this is David Crystal's "The Stories of English". Any other good references out there?
brettp 2y ago
English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and accents. In fact people do it deliberately to distinguish themselves from other speakers of the same language (just take a look at how teenagers' language innovates). French, Spanish, and German all have huge variation in dialects and accents too. English, like many other languages learnt widely as a trade language by non-native speakers, has lost a lot of complexity, notably case system and gender. (Indonesian is perhaps the canonical example of this.) Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. It didn't become the default international language of trade due to any features of the language itself (it did that thanks to the British Empire and in particular its former colony in North America) - but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Because it is so widely spoken by so many people, it does have a large vocabulary and a lot of idioms. But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy ("put an 's' on the third person singular"), and so on.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Yes it is, and you say so yourself: >Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. >A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. Most other languages don't borrow words so profligately, and have much more regular relationships between their written form and their pronunciation. >but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Right, and that makes the language "sloppy", which was my point before. You can't have a language shared by so many different people and cultures as a common trade language and have it stay as orderly and precise as German, for example. >But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy Yes, and these features all make the language much easier for people to adopt as an international language, despite the sloppiness. I have a hard time imagining Russian or German having had this success in a parallel universe. As an example, look at Dutch: the Netherlands is another country that got rich from trade, and was also a colonial power. But who outside of the Netherlands speaks Dutch? South Africa is the only place the language actually went anywhere. Meanwhile, the former colonies of Spain all still use Spanish.

jandrewrogers 2y ago

English is a mess but the pronunciation seems to be fault tolerant. Most skilled speakers can understand people that butcher the complicated pronunciation because it is highly diverse even among native speakers that notionally speak the same dialect. I do wonder if the extreme globalization of English has distilled a robust core that is pronunciation resistant. I have noticed that international English makes word choices that limit pronunciation ambiguity.

gumby 2y ago

> In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronunciation of a word just from how it was written Some other languages. Just considering the Latin alphabet: French pronunciation is so far from spelling that spelling bees used to be (may still be) prime time television. Words in Spanish and Portuguese may be written in a deterministic fashion, yet pronounced quite differently in different countries. And sure, German spelling does reflect pronunciation…because the spelling has been changed from time to time to match shifts in pronunciation…specifically the pronunciation used by a small number of people in Niedersachsen. Elsewhere in Germany (much less Switzerland) the local pronunciation can be incomprehensible. (This was the case in the UK and France until the advent of radio and then especially TV). And that’s just four examples using basically the same alphabet. This phenomenon is common to all living languages. Even dead languages, for that matter: the Latin and (classical) Greek pronunciation I had to use in high school was a UK version different from that typically used in the USA or (based on one person I met), Sweden! And do you really think the same thing doesn’t happen with Arabic, Hindi et al? English ain’t so special.

brettp 2y ago
It's actually not that difficult to tell the pronunciation of a French word from its spelling - the rules are pretty consistent (much more consistent and fewer of them than English). However, it's much more difficult to guess the spelling from the pronunciation due to the number of homophones and silent letters.

xwolfi 2y ago

Hum but English has simpler features that make it easier to learn than most languages. Sure, the phonetic is hard and I'll always have an accent and people will always just guess my country at the first sentence I utter, but: - nouns have no gender !!!! - conjugation is extremely simple (only one variation for 3rd person singular for most verbs!!) - tenses are limited ! - vocabulary is 40% French-Latin and 60% Germanic, most of Europe and America can use the subset they prefer - the writing is latin, simple to learn, complete enough to describe well the sounds - the native community is immense, with a large interesting cultural body of work, making it interesting to learn - it's easy to start communicating but it can be extremely rich in higher levels of language: you start talking quickly and then can move to beautiful structures later: there is a quick reward and a long term reward There is nothing unfortunate it became default, there is simply no better lingua franca today. We could try Japanese or Chinese, Hindi or Spanish, but they all have way more quirks and way less qualities ! I strongly reject people saying that English became default by historical chance, it could have stayed French, moved to German or Spanish, it SHOULD be Chinese, but all of them are too hard for adults to learn as quickly as English and never as rewarding. Just think of the time it takes to learn an ideogram-based writing system, all that to end up able to read only communist propaganda or very old poetry for instance...

brettp 2y ago
Arguably English became the default by a very large historical chance: that Napoleon sold off his North American colonies - a huge swathe of what is now the United States - to finance his wars in Europe. At the same time that both France and England were sniffing around Australia, France again was distracted by its wars. Both the United States and Australia could very easily have been French speaking, and if they had been, I suggest we'd be having this discussion sur internet en français
- xwolfi 2y ago
  Sure maybe, but French, my native language btw, is inherently more complex, less rich in vocabulary, idiosyncratic in its habit to follow latin in writing but deviating from it in spoken form, it's just not as good as English so we're quite lucky at least. I feel it's hard for me to make spelling mistakes in English, which is not my native tongue, but VERY EASY to make them in French, that I studied and used for decades: there is an inherent beauty to English, in its simplicity, we should not dismiss. (yes I'm re-reading three times to make sure I didn't spell anything wrong lol)

sersi 2y ago

> The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on. I speak a few languages (French, English, Japanese, German, Spanish, Chinese), some fluently, some less so and, honestly, in all of these languages, I can use tiny differences to other people based on social status, geography etc... It's easy in Mandarin despite me not being able to speak it that well. Japanese has a lot of variation between regions. I can quickly tell the level of education of someone speaking French (my native language) as well as guess where they're likely to be from, etc... I don't think that English is any different from any other languages on those points.

euroderf 2y ago

Agreed. For so many words in common usage, English spelling (vis-à-vis pronunciation) is aggressively misleading, deceptive, pain-inducing. In the grand scheme of things, it's unfortunate that English lazily conquered the internet without any kind of preventive maintenance rooted in critical thinking. It's not nutty (maybe just futile) to argue that English desperately needs fixing. The distributed nature of English should be encouraging for experimentation. Most native English speakers just roll over and succumb to Stockholm Syndrome. Every would-be/aspiring spelling reformer has mentally composed a manifesto of righteousness.

maxerickson 2y ago
If you want to reform spelling of English words, the thing to do is to start. There's no one to make a prescriptive mandate, and it anyway wouldn't work.
- euroderf 2y ago
  Distributed means opt-in only. Which means naming & categorizing & organizing.