8 ms·

I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling

I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...)

BitwiseFool 2y ago
I jokingly suggest that, by definition, the only person who uses English properly and speaks without an accent is the King.
- anthk 2y ago
  Hence the "Royal Academy of English" -> RAE, as in Real Academia Española.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  If it's English because the King speaks it, how come the most famous document written in (modern) English tells the King to take a hike?
  - int_19h 2y ago
    But the King is basically German. ~
  - kps 2y ago
    Exeunt, bearing off the dead bodies; after which a peal of ordnance is shot off.
SllX 2y ago
I’ve seen similar suggestions but one of the best things about English is that we don’t have that nonsense. It would just be a source of annoyance and consternation adding more noise to news and politics in the Anglosphere.
- ktosobcy 2y ago
  Dumb and inconsistent spelling is already a source of "annoyance" :P
  - SllX 2y ago
    Yeah but we in the Anglosphere have this wonderful phrase for people that get too hung up on it: “get over it.” I honestly don’t care if someone uses “color” or “colour” or makes ghoti jokes at the English language’s expense.
    - ktosobcy 2y ago
      > Yeah but we in the Anglosphere have this wonderful phrase for people that get too hung up on it: “get over it.” Unfortunately for the rest of the world outside of your beloved "anglosphere" using wrong spelling results in said "anglosphereian" being utterly butthurt. Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
      - SllX 2y ago
        > your beloved Don’t put words in my mouth. > Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere? The rest of the world could. They won’t. But they could. You could use this as part of your spelling reforms: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 :)
taylorius 2y ago
Nah, such a body would surely be the beginning of the end. Anarchy in the UK, including its language!
- eastbound 2y ago
  France has the Académie Française. Well, no-one respects them. The first woman to enter it was Marguerite Yourcenar and she was strongly antifeminist; And they said to not use the Français.e.s spelling and rather keep the usual “Français(es)”, and suddenly all administrations started the dot-based version.
onlypassingthru 2y ago
The beauty of English is that it is controlled by the speakers and not by some pompous authority. It's even flexible enough to allow for regional differences, which allows my fellow Americans and I to spell words correctly like color and theater.
- martijnarts 2y ago
  For what it's worth, French is also controlled by speakers. The pompous authority is just lagging behind.
  - seszett 2y ago
    There is not authority for french, it's a myth. The Académie has no authority whatsoever, it's little more than a club for writers. The Education Ministry has authority for school programs and what is accepted in French language classes, but only in France. It only ever allows new uses, never forbids previously allowed things. The OQLF (and French language Ministry) has a broader authority within Québec, but only for Québec. The Ministry of Culture has some authority within the Brussels-Wallonia federation but it's quite limited. No idea what it's like in Switzerland. But there is no global authority for the French language (unlike German or Dutch for example). The language evolves by consensus.
- r00fus 2y ago
  You do realize that what people actually speak (in France) differs quite a bit from the Académie Française. email vs. courriel for example is a good one, but you'll stand out in most places if you don't know l'argot (slang). I don't think an English standardization would change much in how people actually speak.
  - ktosobcy 2y ago
    Well, loanwords is slightly different that completely inconsistent spelling - wouldn't you say? Imagine some would stick with original "bonjour" (Qubec), other more progressive would simplify to "bojur" and whatnote. You have the same with "colour" and "color". Or "night" and "nite". From my observatio where you have some language authority there is at least consisten spelling (and english spelling is all over the place)
graypegg 2y ago
There are specific subsets of English that are used in certain domains that have standards bodies behind them, like Simplified Technical English for aviation. It even has a working group! [0] VOA also have a Learning English spec for broadcast english [1] but that seems to be a lot looser of a spec. So it's definitely not impossible. The funny thing, is I remember being told in grade school that in English Canada, I was to write numbers with a space as the thousands separator. `$10 000.00`, instead of `$10,000.00`. This is because french Canada uses a comma as a decimal point, `10 000.00 $`, so a space is non ambiguous. I have rarely ever seen the English space format in use here. I don't think English speakers would respect any authority if it wasn't as domain-scoped as Aviation or Learning english. [0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_English_(version_of_English) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_English_(version_of_E...
- speakeron 2y ago
  The use of a space as a thousands separator has been around since the 1940s as recommended by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and it was what we used when I was a kid at school in the UK. They specified it should be a thin (half) space. https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28433818/working-document-ID-10850/978c05bc-b4ce-adce-ba8b-8eb9bf48c509 https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28433818/working-docume...
  - graypegg 2y ago
    No I know, it's also part of the French standard. Just more so commenting on how uncommon it is from Canadian English speakers despite it being the Canadian English "standard" recommend by a Canadian entity similar to the French or German standards bodies.
- michaelt 2y ago
  > So it's definitely not impossible. Well, it's definitely not impossible to publish a document declaring itself the standard form of english. But I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to get english speakers to comply - or even to get any countries to make the standard legally binding.
partiallypro 2y ago
One reason English is so popular (aside from pure economics) and that other countries quickly adopt English slang words is because we don't have such a thing.
- ktosobcy 2y ago
  Care to explain about "not having slang"? From my observation adoption of english (and it's slang) is mostly due to "verbal colonialism" - pop culture mixed with "we work in english" spiced with "I'm cool so I'll drop this pointless slang from foreign language"...
tivert 2y ago
> I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;) That's even less likely now than in the past, with the elite cultural trends in English-speaking countries favoring the adoption of foreign spellings and pronunciation. That just piles on the complexity to unmanageable levels. IMHO, for instance, there's no excuse for the requirement that English newspaper readers know Pinyin [1], rather than some more English-friendly romanization system, to be able to read news about China, when Chinese speakers themselves use a completely different, non-roman writing system. What's next, just printing the Chinese characters without romanization? Pinyin has its uses, but writing things out for foreigners is not something it does well. [1] which gives many letters very unexpected values (e.g. c = ts) and many vowels are impossible for an English-speaker to guess correctly.
- hosh 2y ago
  Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”?
  - tivert 2y ago
    > Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. It's pretty good for Mandarin speakers. It's terrible for English speakers. > Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”? English friendly is something that will produce reasonably-close approximate pronunciations by an English reader without any extra foreign-language training. Basically, something that prioritizes following existing English orthography (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language.
    - hosh 2y ago
      Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations. I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
meyum33 2y ago
It won’t work. Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States. And this is when the metric system is vastly more straightforward, simply better, and universally adopted. The English language? No way any standardization would work. And that unlike the Imperial system the variations in English is probably a feature, not a bug.
- gtk40 2y ago
  And it is not just the US. In the UK from my limited experience visiting they use a mess of different units commonly. Certainly not all in on metric.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States. The US doesn't use Imperial units; it uses "US Customary" units. They're not the same, though there is some overlap. Imperial units are used in the UK, which is why they're called "imperial" (from "empire"--the British Empire). Imperial inches, for instance, are the same as US inches (2.54cm), but UK/Imperial gallons are quite different from US gallons, which is why the miles-per-gallon ratings for cars are so different between the two countries.
tannhaeuser 2y ago
I think the article's wording > guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography gives a somewhat false impression regarding the influence and standing of this body. Orthography was traditionally what was written in the Duden dictionary/thesaurus. Only in 2004 or so there was a push for a moderate reform for German as taught in schools, and it was deemed necessary to have at least Austria and Switzerland join (hence the council isn't a natioval body), whereas neighbouring countries with German-speaking minorities such as Italy were not sitting at the table it seems.
scheme271 2y ago
But those standardisation bodies often get ignored by most of the speakers. Language is a living thing that evolves and changes in spite of the dictates of academies. Also, with global usage, any given body is not going to be able to do much, e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE says or a Quebecois would probably laugh at what the French language academy dictates.
- ktosobcy 2y ago
  > e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE says Erm... curious that you brought that up as I lived in Chile for a couple of years and now in Spain. And while I agree that Chilean Spanish is wild it does follow RAE spelling guidelines, or at the very least I haven't seen any obvious deviations. Now there's a lot of modismos ("chilenismos", local words formed usually by borrowing from natives Mapuche in south or Quechua in the north) but they still tend to follow more-or-less spelling. Accent/pronounciation is yet another thing but that doesn't affect spelling all that much. And on top of that there is a lot of "mutilation" of words when using whatsapp (either being in a hurry or being from low social background) but even in even so slightly more formal setting people immediatelly fallback to official spelling. (Spanish is more gracefull when it comes to spelling as "what you hear you write" and vice versa so maybe the problem is less pronounced)
wkat4242 2y ago
But which English? American and British English are substantially different. Spelling of many words, expressions, even the way quotation marks and periods are ordered. I doubt either country will ever accept the other's version.

BitwiseFool 2y ago

I jokingly suggest that, by definition, the only person who uses English properly and speaks without an accent is the King.

anthk 2y ago
Hence the "Royal Academy of English" -> RAE, as in Real Academia Española.
lenerdenator 2y ago
If it's English because the King speaks it, how come the most famous document written in (modern) English tells the King to take a hike?
- int_19h 2y ago
  But the King is basically German. ~
- kps 2y ago
  Exeunt, bearing off the dead bodies; after which a peal of ordnance is shot off.

SllX 2y ago

I’ve seen similar suggestions but one of the best things about English is that we don’t have that nonsense. It would just be a source of annoyance and consternation adding more noise to news and politics in the Anglosphere.

ktosobcy 2y ago
Dumb and inconsistent spelling is already a source of "annoyance" :P
- SllX 2y ago
  Yeah but we in the Anglosphere have this wonderful phrase for people that get too hung up on it: “get over it.” I honestly don’t care if someone uses “color” or “colour” or makes ghoti jokes at the English language’s expense.
  - ktosobcy 2y ago
    > Yeah but we in the Anglosphere have this wonderful phrase for people that get too hung up on it: “get over it.” Unfortunately for the rest of the world outside of your beloved "anglosphere" using wrong spelling results in said "anglosphereian" being utterly butthurt. Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
    - SllX 2y ago
      > your beloved Don’t put words in my mouth. > Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere? The rest of the world could. They won’t. But they could. You could use this as part of your spelling reforms: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 :)

taylorius 2y ago

Nah, such a body would surely be the beginning of the end. Anarchy in the UK, including its language!

eastbound 2y ago
France has the Académie Française. Well, no-one respects them. The first woman to enter it was Marguerite Yourcenar and she was strongly antifeminist; And they said to not use the Français.e.s spelling and rather keep the usual “Français(es)”, and suddenly all administrations started the dot-based version.

onlypassingthru 2y ago

The beauty of English is that it is controlled by the speakers and not by some pompous authority. It's even flexible enough to allow for regional differences, which allows my fellow Americans and I to spell words correctly like color and theater.

martijnarts 2y ago
For what it's worth, French is also controlled by speakers. The pompous authority is just lagging behind.
- seszett 2y ago
  There is not authority for french, it's a myth. The Académie has no authority whatsoever, it's little more than a club for writers. The Education Ministry has authority for school programs and what is accepted in French language classes, but only in France. It only ever allows new uses, never forbids previously allowed things. The OQLF (and French language Ministry) has a broader authority within Québec, but only for Québec. The Ministry of Culture has some authority within the Brussels-Wallonia federation but it's quite limited. No idea what it's like in Switzerland. But there is no global authority for the French language (unlike German or Dutch for example). The language evolves by consensus.
r00fus 2y ago
You do realize that what people actually speak (in France) differs quite a bit from the Académie Française. email vs. courriel for example is a good one, but you'll stand out in most places if you don't know l'argot (slang). I don't think an English standardization would change much in how people actually speak.
- ktosobcy 2y ago
  Well, loanwords is slightly different that completely inconsistent spelling - wouldn't you say? Imagine some would stick with original "bonjour" (Qubec), other more progressive would simplify to "bojur" and whatnote. You have the same with "colour" and "color". Or "night" and "nite". From my observatio where you have some language authority there is at least consisten spelling (and english spelling is all over the place)

graypegg 2y ago

There are specific subsets of English that are used in certain domains that have standards bodies behind them, like Simplified Technical English for aviation. It even has a working group! [0] VOA also have a Learning English spec for broadcast english [1] but that seems to be a lot looser of a spec. So it's definitely not impossible. The funny thing, is I remember being told in grade school that in English Canada, I was to write numbers with a space as the thousands separator. `$10 000.00`, instead of `$10,000.00`. This is because french Canada uses a comma as a decimal point, `10 000.00 $`, so a space is non ambiguous. I have rarely ever seen the English space format in use here. I don't think English speakers would respect any authority if it wasn't as domain-scoped as Aviation or Learning english. [0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_English_(version_of_English) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_English_(version_of_E...

speakeron 2y ago
The use of a space as a thousands separator has been around since the 1940s as recommended by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and it was what we used when I was a kid at school in the UK. They specified it should be a thin (half) space. https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28433818/working-document-ID-10850/978c05bc-b4ce-adce-ba8b-8eb9bf48c509 https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28433818/working-docume...
- graypegg 2y ago
  No I know, it's also part of the French standard. Just more so commenting on how uncommon it is from Canadian English speakers despite it being the Canadian English "standard" recommend by a Canadian entity similar to the French or German standards bodies.
michaelt 2y ago
> So it's definitely not impossible. Well, it's definitely not impossible to publish a document declaring itself the standard form of english. But I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to get english speakers to comply - or even to get any countries to make the standard legally binding.

partiallypro 2y ago

One reason English is so popular (aside from pure economics) and that other countries quickly adopt English slang words is because we don't have such a thing.

ktosobcy 2y ago
Care to explain about "not having slang"? From my observation adoption of english (and it's slang) is mostly due to "verbal colonialism" - pop culture mixed with "we work in english" spiced with "I'm cool so I'll drop this pointless slang from foreign language"...

tivert 2y ago

> I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;) That's even less likely now than in the past, with the elite cultural trends in English-speaking countries favoring the adoption of foreign spellings and pronunciation. That just piles on the complexity to unmanageable levels. IMHO, for instance, there's no excuse for the requirement that English newspaper readers know Pinyin [1], rather than some more English-friendly romanization system, to be able to read news about China, when Chinese speakers themselves use a completely different, non-roman writing system. What's next, just printing the Chinese characters without romanization? Pinyin has its uses, but writing things out for foreigners is not something it does well. [1] which gives many letters very unexpected values (e.g. c = ts) and many vowels are impossible for an English-speaker to guess correctly.

hosh 2y ago
Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”?
- tivert 2y ago
  > Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. It's pretty good for Mandarin speakers. It's terrible for English speakers. > Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”? English friendly is something that will produce reasonably-close approximate pronunciations by an English reader without any extra foreign-language training. Basically, something that prioritizes following existing English orthography (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language.
  - hosh 2y ago
    Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations. I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.

meyum33 2y ago

It won’t work. Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States. And this is when the metric system is vastly more straightforward, simply better, and universally adopted. The English language? No way any standardization would work. And that unlike the Imperial system the variations in English is probably a feature, not a bug.

gtk40 2y ago
And it is not just the US. In the UK from my limited experience visiting they use a mess of different units commonly. Certainly not all in on metric.
shiroiushi 2y ago
>Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States. The US doesn't use Imperial units; it uses "US Customary" units. They're not the same, though there is some overlap. Imperial units are used in the UK, which is why they're called "imperial" (from "empire"--the British Empire). Imperial inches, for instance, are the same as US inches (2.54cm), but UK/Imperial gallons are quite different from US gallons, which is why the miles-per-gallon ratings for cars are so different between the two countries.

tannhaeuser 2y ago

I think the article's wording > guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography gives a somewhat false impression regarding the influence and standing of this body. Orthography was traditionally what was written in the Duden dictionary/thesaurus. Only in 2004 or so there was a push for a moderate reform for German as taught in schools, and it was deemed necessary to have at least Austria and Switzerland join (hence the council isn't a natioval body), whereas neighbouring countries with German-speaking minorities such as Italy were not sitting at the table it seems.

scheme271 2y ago

But those standardisation bodies often get ignored by most of the speakers. Language is a living thing that evolves and changes in spite of the dictates of academies. Also, with global usage, any given body is not going to be able to do much, e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE says or a Quebecois would probably laugh at what the French language academy dictates.

ktosobcy 2y ago
> e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE says Erm... curious that you brought that up as I lived in Chile for a couple of years and now in Spain. And while I agree that Chilean Spanish is wild it does follow RAE spelling guidelines, or at the very least I haven't seen any obvious deviations. Now there's a lot of modismos ("chilenismos", local words formed usually by borrowing from natives Mapuche in south or Quechua in the north) but they still tend to follow more-or-less spelling. Accent/pronounciation is yet another thing but that doesn't affect spelling all that much. And on top of that there is a lot of "mutilation" of words when using whatsapp (either being in a hurry or being from low social background) but even in even so slightly more formal setting people immediatelly fallback to official spelling. (Spanish is more gracefull when it comes to spelling as "what you hear you write" and vice versa so maybe the problem is less pronounced)

wkat4242 2y ago

But which English? American and British English are substantially different. Spelling of many words, expressions, even the way quotation marks and periods are ordered. I doubt either country will ever accept the other's version.