"The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas."
This is cute, up until the point where it starts reaching and makes changes which are important for the sound of the language.
The e in many words isn't silent, it's a modifier. Kit and kite are different words. "th", "z", "w", and "v" are all really different sounds. While certain accents (or children) do occasionally conflate them, in basically every case, it's technically incorrect. Zebra, Webra, Vebra, and Thebra are all totally different words to a native English speaker.
I'm absolutely behind the idea of simplified English where spelling and pronunciation match. But that's a lofty goal, as first one would have to canonize English, which is basically impossible at this point. Then they'd have to tackle homonyms, like cot and caught (assuming canonized English has these pronounced the same).
So basically English spelling is trapped in a local minimum. An small change will make spelling closer to some dialect, and further from most other dialects. The current situation is suboptimal for everyone, but at least it's a Nash equilibrium.
That's certainly true for things like vowels, but there are other situations where spelling could be changed with no ambiguity problems in any dialect. For example, basically every word that contains "gh" can be simplified, as <gh> represents a /x/ sound like German "Bach" that dropped out of the language in the 1200s. Nobody is confused by "tho" and "thru".
Another easy example is just fixing "island". The <s> was never pronounced. Medieval scribes put it there because they incorrectly guessed that the word was related to Latin "insula".
I personally think there's a lot of room for improvements that would work in nearly all English dialects. The "ough" mess, for example, could stand some clean up. But in general, yes, there is too much variation in English around the world to "fix" it now.
You're hitting the phonological analogue of Moravec's law: the "ough" mess is precisely the kind of thing that can't easily be simplified in a way that works across English dialects. It hits a wide swath of basic vocabulary that originally had a small range of slightly awkward pronunciations that diverged in descendant English. Different dialects don't split those pronunciations the same way.
The real low-hanging fruit is getting the British to give up on those spellings that follow a dead branch of French ;-)
Because 'Kite' should be spelt 'Kait'. The English I/E/AI vowel sounds are a massive mess. I realised this only after starting lessons in Japanese, where the vowel sounds are almost entirely regular. Ke always sounds like Kelp, and Ki always sounds like Kit and Ka will always sound like Kart.
I'd pronounce kite and kait differently I think. More rising on the latter. Being acceptably good at Dutch pronunciation, though non-native, I'd suggest keit, and I'm assuming that it's the same in German too.
But really, it should be kite because that's what it is :)
Well kite could be written as keit to match the pronunciation :)
For most non-native speakers, the backtracking of silent `e` is more confusing. It does not help in case of `sake` vs `saké` where most people do not add the acute mark and use context for disambiguation.
Yes. In British English, one problem with any sort of spelling reform is that the pronunciations of many words have significant regional variations. For example, in a Southern English accent, words like Bath and Castle are pronounced with a long vowel (almost as if they were spelt 'Barth and 'Carstle') compared with the much shorter Northern English versions ('baf', 'cassl').
To pick a particular pronunciation-based spelling of words would therefore be to prefer one region over another. This would at least trigger a monumental North vs. South argument, assuming that the plans survived the inevitable knee-jerk reactions / incredulity of the usual media suspects.
Probably best if we stick to arguing about daylight saving time, or changes to the format of cricket matches.
There are a few changes that I believe are universal. I'm thinking hard/soft "c" becoming "k"/"s" and soft "g" becoming "j". I don't think I've heard any dialects where there's a difference between whether you pronounce the "c" in a word as hard or soft.
But then again, those rules are pretty standard (c/g before e/i [the "skinny vowels"]) are almost always soft and they are hard otherwise. If you need a soft "c" sound before an "a" then you just use the letter "s". So maybe it's not even worth the effort.
> I don't think I've heard any dialects where there's a difference between whether you pronounce the "c" in a word as hard or soft.
Um, yes, I can't think of regular words where a "c" changes.
<thinks a bit more>
Place names. Place names - at least in England - can have significant differences between spelling and pronunciation, and the locals will often use or be aware of a local pronunciation that isn't obvious to outsiders. Examples include Bicester ('bister'), Leicester ('lester'), Salisbury ('solsbry'), Tottenham ('totnam') and many others. It's not quite the same effect as with dialects but it certainly complicates spelling reform.
People also fucking haaaate changes in language. Especially older people.
I had a 85 year old (yes) technical writing professor in college who insisted that we do our papers using the "Queen's English" that he learned growing up in Catholic school. He even went so far as to write a damn book outlining his rules for English writing because none of the existing style guides out there matched his view of the language.
You'll never get people like that to adopt any sort of change to the language.
That's not universal at all. Many languages have spelling reform every couple of decades. French spelling was updated in 1991 and German in 1996. Dutch was reformed in 1996 and 2006.
I think it's easier when there's a single polity that represents the "entirety" of that languages speaking community. Nobody controls English in the same way - I'd say the US and UK have equal claim to being able to formalize language changes, but good luck getting 2 billion people to follow them.
I think for those languages (I know French and German have them, unsure about Polish) there is a central body which "controls" the language, meanwhile in English we don't have one.
There is one for Polish but I think English speakers overestimate the power such bodies have over people :)
The only power they have is influencing the way kids are taught at school. Everything else changes by social pressure and exposure - most media choose to follow the new convention and people get used to it over time.
The changes are very gradual - the only big one I remember was in 90s - changing how "not" was written with adjectives and adverbs. The rules got much simpler so few people complained.
So the only power such bodies have is being able to influence the entirety of the next generation of the speakers of the language? That's surely some amount of power that nobody holds whatsoever on the English language. Israel was able to use the educational system to revive a millenia-dead old language, that's quite a lot of power.
I meant the direct influence would only be noticeable after decades, but because of media and social pressure after a few years most adult people switched.
You still need c for “ch” so perhaps, like Indonesian, you can just use “c” in place of “ch.”
Oh, and Indonesian is my favorite lingua franca. Super easy to learn for anyone and also simple, phonetic spelling.
I had only ever learned Indo-European languages (ie English, Spanish, French) and a bit of Japanese (also unrelated to Indonesian), but I was able to pick up a useful amount of conversational Indonesian in about 3-4 weeks. Indonesian is an Austronesian language (actually a standardized variant of Malay) and totally unrelated to my mother tongue (American English), yet it was the easiest thing to pick up. Sounding out new words in Indonesian is actually easier than English to me.
If you want to go that route, it's fun to imagine a "unified Germanic" achieved by systematic reform to bring the main Germanic language closer together.
Start by purging English of French influence, starting with words where words of Germanic origin exists with a similar meaning. Simplify German grammar. Undo some consonant shifts. E.g (the German and Dutch I had to check/adjust w/Google translate; no guarantees for accuracy):
Swedish: En dag kan vi alla tala samma språk
Norwegian: En dag kan vi alle snakke samme språk (or "det samme språket")
Danish: En dag kan vi alle tale det samme sprog
German: Eines Tages können wir alle dieselbe Sprache sprechen
Dutch: Op een dag kunnen we allemaal dezelfde taal spreken
English: One day we can all speak the same language
Now consider "speech" as an alternative to "language" in English (alternatively: "tale" is valid but archaic in Norwegian in this context and we have the English cognate "talk"), and undo that D->T consonant shift in German (e.g. compare Tag to Low German "Dag"), and replace "the" (compare det/de/die/das/der etc.).
There are a whole lot of simple spelling and sound changes that'd bring the above languages a lot closer together very easily.
Of course it's easy in theory - in practice I've lived through multiple Norwegian language reforms and know how excruciatingly slow it can be to get people to adapt (e.g. Norway changed the spoken form of numbers above 20 in 1952 from the equivalent of "four and fifty" to "fifty-four"; my parents learned the new forms in primary school, yet I still picked up the old forms from them in the late 70's and still switch back and forth between the old and new forms now)
Unpopular opinion: Declension and conjugation are nice! It means different forms for the act of watching X (watching birds), X that is watching (watching eyes), or X that is used for the act of watching (watching post). So you immediately know which one is which, instead of trying to figure that out from context (you have 200 milliseconds before the next sentence starts, good luck).
In English it's not based on context, it's based on word order. Declension is a cool concept but it's far more confusing to foreigners because word order basically doesn't matter.
For example in Czech:
Jan zabil Petra
Jan Petra zabil
Petra Jan zabil
Petra zabil Jan
Zabil Petra Jan
and
Zabil Jan Petra
are all equivalent to the English "John killed Peter." Change Jan to Jana and Petra to Petr and all 6 of those become "Peter killed John." Even more confusing to a foreigner learning it is that Petra and Jana are the feminine forms of those names in the nominative case.
I don't think declensions and conjugations matter all that much, seeing how Latin was the Lingua Franca for 2000+ years, and _the_ Lingua Franca: French, has a load of irregulars too.
German has significantly fewer irregular verbs than English.
It's ~200 to ~300. (French is double that?)
There's enough to be moderately annoying, but not that bad. Also (in my personal opinion), German irregular verbs tend to be not-as-irregular as English.
The fuzzy thing with counting French irregular verbs is that there are so many that follow similar patterns that they really can't be treated as fully irregular. More, like...oddly specific variants of the -re/-ir/-er verb classes. (You can get into this with English, too, in things like "to come", "came"/"to become", "became", or "to hold", "held"/"to behold", "beheld", but we actually IIRC have fewer groupings like this.) So the raw French number is higher in a strict sense, but potentially between English and German overall.
Yes, in "proper" spanish they sound different. That said, except when exaggerating, I know noone who makes the distinction in day to day conversations!
That one predates Reddit's existence, it was already being passed around the internet in the 90s. There are a couple of slightly different variations floating around.
As someone who speaks both English and German natively, I can say Dutch makes my brain hurt whenever I hear it. It’s like my brain can’t pick which neural pathways to use and the dissonance is awful.
Even as a native English speaker who speaks no German, I find being in The Netherlands to feel a lot like the part of my brain that is hearing a conversation and trying to tune in is working at native speed, but the language parsing part can't make any sense of it.
Sometimes when I'm in parts of the world where I'm surrounded by other languages I don't speak, I find I'm almost automatically tuning out people speaking them around me. That doesn't happen at all with Dutch.
Speaking of Portuguese, I've always found the usage of "ç" to be interesting. I've never studied the language but just from looking at words it's clearly the way to represent the soft "c" sound before a "fat" vowel (a/o/u). How did those words ended up with a "ç" instead of an "s"?
This thread finally made me remember to go look it up and it seems like the "ç" used to be a different sound (/dz/). I guess it evolved to the "s" sound we hear today sometime by the 1700s.
I wonder if that means only words older than the 1700s have the cedilha and newer words would just be spelled with an "s"?
Yes, I always figured it was related to the French usage. Not sure who used it first. Hmm, guess that leaves Þ | Θ - thorn or theta for "th", but I'm less enthusiastic.
"The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas."