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Fixing the half-arssed effort Sam Johnson is famous for is long overdue. Although we owe him a debt, that unnecessary B in debt is completely ridiculous. The l

Fixing the half-arssed effort Sam Johnson is famous for is long overdue. Although we owe him a debt, that unnecessary B in debt is completely ridiculous. The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing. I wish this would have taken off (Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun?). Sadly, we'll need a dictator like Sejong the Great to make it happen.

bigstrat2003 1y ago
> Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun? We have those. "He/him/his" are gender-neutral pronouns in English. People simply assume they are male-only, but that isn't true.
- AstralStorm 1y ago
  Ambiguous pronoun/declination is not the same as neutral. We have the same problem in Polish. People will assume the male gender even if it's technically correct.
bigDinosaur 1y ago
Curious what's wrong with 'they'?
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  Yup. “They” has been accepted in major style guides and it’s what I use. It’s at times a bit limiting because there can be ambiguity for singular and plural but overall it’s pretty much a non-issue.
  - sheiyei 1y ago
    Imagine having a language with no issues cobbling together significant portions of vocabulary from at least 8 different languages, and then ending up with the same pronoun for plural and singular, in both the 2nd and 3rd persons...
    - Ekaros 1y ago
      Might as well go full way and adopt also we for both singular and plural.
      - olddustytrail 1y ago
        Or imagine dropping "thou" and using "you" for both singular and plural. Crazy!
        Waterluvian 1y ago
        Outrageous! How dare things keep evolving after I’m done evolving?
        readthenotes1 1y ago
        It's why we have y'all
        olddustytrail 1y ago
        In my area it's "youse".
      - em-bee 1y ago
        the pluralis majestatis is really a missed opportunity.
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  Because using one word for two different things can lead to confusion, and over time will simply lead to us creating a different word. They, as you probably know, is 3rd person plural. You might look up the history of thee, thou, and you. And then consider why y'all is taking the world by storm. Sweden has "hen". I often use it while writing
com2kid 1y ago
Soundspel is my personal favorite proposal, it is easy for existing English readers to read, I suspect only a few hours would be needed to come to to full speed. With most text being read on a screen now days, phones and computers could have a button to switch between spelling systems. Sadly, it'll never happen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel
- cornholio 1y ago
  It's interesting ChatGPT can't produce anything close to SoundSpell no matter how I prompt it, it will invent its own system. I'm sure it can be easily be trained to with enough samples just like it knows any other language, but for now it seems a good way to know you are reading a human generated text.
- Digit-Al 1y ago
  Interesting, but surely thought should be thawt instead of thot.
  - danw1979 1y ago
    That one stood out for me too. I think there’s a lot of pronunciation nuance that would be lost with SoundSpel. I’d distrust any top-down effort to change a language anyway. It belongs to the users and they’ll adapt it to their needs the way they see fit.
  - com2kid 1y ago
    Honestly if we are using a perfectly phonical system, I feel the correct answer would be to spell it however your local dialect pronounces it. For my Pacific Northwest accent, either pronunciation works fine.
toast0 1y ago
> The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing. Well, it's worse than that, because English speakers don't agree on how words sound. So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place ... but not for all instances of those vowel sounds in all words. Some people like to add r's that aren't there, but there's a few places to do it. You'd need a much tighter language community to enforce consistent enough pronunciation that a phonetic alphabet would work. And you'd be giving up centuries of printed works to do it.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  Been thinking about this and Finnish dialects can be misspelled mostly inside standard writing system. I see no reason why words should not have multiple spellings matching to different pronunciations. It is kinda a thing already when different local words are used. So why not go entire way. Write how it is pronounced even if someone uses different pronounciation.
- danw1979 1y ago
  I think of English as being actually not a single language but rather dialects with many different pronunciations which share most of their written form. I also think this means any centralised effort to change how it is written will fall flat. We can’t agree in my house how to pronounce “bath” so how will the entire English speaking world agree on the spelling of every such word with consistent meaning but differing pronunciation…
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  > So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place Which is how the language functioned before the printing press.
eadmund 1y ago
> Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun? We have one: ‘it.’ What we don’t have is a specific indistinct-gender pronoun; instead, English uses ‘he’ (and in a very limited case, ‘they’).

bigstrat2003 1y ago

> Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun? We have those. "He/him/his" are gender-neutral pronouns in English. People simply assume they are male-only, but that isn't true.

AstralStorm 1y ago
Ambiguous pronoun/declination is not the same as neutral. We have the same problem in Polish. People will assume the male gender even if it's technically correct.

bigDinosaur 1y ago

Curious what's wrong with 'they'?

Waterluvian 1y ago
Yup. “They” has been accepted in major style guides and it’s what I use. It’s at times a bit limiting because there can be ambiguity for singular and plural but overall it’s pretty much a non-issue.
- sheiyei 1y ago
  Imagine having a language with no issues cobbling together significant portions of vocabulary from at least 8 different languages, and then ending up with the same pronoun for plural and singular, in both the 2nd and 3rd persons...
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    Might as well go full way and adopt also we for both singular and plural.
    - olddustytrail 1y ago
      Or imagine dropping "thou" and using "you" for both singular and plural. Crazy!
      - Waterluvian 1y ago
        Outrageous! How dare things keep evolving after I’m done evolving?
      - readthenotes1 1y ago
        It's why we have y'all
        olddustytrail 1y ago
        In my area it's "youse".
    - em-bee 1y ago
      the pluralis majestatis is really a missed opportunity.
readthenotes1 1y ago
Because using one word for two different things can lead to confusion, and over time will simply lead to us creating a different word. They, as you probably know, is 3rd person plural. You might look up the history of thee, thou, and you. And then consider why y'all is taking the world by storm. Sweden has "hen". I often use it while writing

com2kid 1y ago

Soundspel is my personal favorite proposal, it is easy for existing English readers to read, I suspect only a few hours would be needed to come to to full speed. With most text being read on a screen now days, phones and computers could have a button to switch between spelling systems. Sadly, it'll never happen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel

cornholio 1y ago
It's interesting ChatGPT can't produce anything close to SoundSpell no matter how I prompt it, it will invent its own system. I'm sure it can be easily be trained to with enough samples just like it knows any other language, but for now it seems a good way to know you are reading a human generated text.
Digit-Al 1y ago
Interesting, but surely thought should be thawt instead of thot.
- danw1979 1y ago
  That one stood out for me too. I think there’s a lot of pronunciation nuance that would be lost with SoundSpel. I’d distrust any top-down effort to change a language anyway. It belongs to the users and they’ll adapt it to their needs the way they see fit.
- com2kid 1y ago
  Honestly if we are using a perfectly phonical system, I feel the correct answer would be to spell it however your local dialect pronounces it. For my Pacific Northwest accent, either pronunciation works fine.

toast0 1y ago

> The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing. Well, it's worse than that, because English speakers don't agree on how words sound. So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place ... but not for all instances of those vowel sounds in all words. Some people like to add r's that aren't there, but there's a few places to do it. You'd need a much tighter language community to enforce consistent enough pronunciation that a phonetic alphabet would work. And you'd be giving up centuries of printed works to do it.

Ekaros 1y ago
Been thinking about this and Finnish dialects can be misspelled mostly inside standard writing system. I see no reason why words should not have multiple spellings matching to different pronunciations. It is kinda a thing already when different local words are used. So why not go entire way. Write how it is pronounced even if someone uses different pronounciation.
danw1979 1y ago
I think of English as being actually not a single language but rather dialects with many different pronunciations which share most of their written form. I also think this means any centralised effort to change how it is written will fall flat. We can’t agree in my house how to pronounce “bath” so how will the entire English speaking world agree on the spelling of every such word with consistent meaning but differing pronunciation…
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
> So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place Which is how the language functioned before the printing press.

eadmund 1y ago

> Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun? We have one: ‘it.’ What we don’t have is a specific indistinct-gender pronoun; instead, English uses ‘he’ (and in a very limited case, ‘they’).