3 ms·

"a single world-wide time zone", Yes. As someone who works with clients in different parts of the world I really do long for a single time zone that we can all

• thanksgiving 12y ago
  > However, "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet" is a terrible idea What if we could dissociate spoken language from written language? We could just use the 26 letters in English to write everything. This could allow Romanization of everything without those pesky accent marks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese
  • dyadic 12y ago
    Perhaps I should have expanded on why writing a spoken language as IPA is a bad idea. Language is fluid and always changing, if you start to spell words using the IPA then you need variations for every different accent and you need to update the spelling as accents change over time. Words have almost always been written down as they sound, but then the way that we say them changes. Some changes in written language happen, an obvious contemporary example being the differences between UK English and US English. But writing in IPA would mean that we need to update our written texts as our language change or it would mean that every person has to speak it the same way and in every location forever, and that you need to police it so people don't speak incorrectly.