When I tried it just for a few days, I was surprised how easy it was to learn. It was much easier to learn than English. On the other hand so many people already know English vocabulary that just having regular spelling and simple grammar could work. Mark Twain already suggested it:
"A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling: For example, in Year
1 that useless letter 'c' would be dropped to be replased either by
'k' or 's', and likewise 'x' would no longer be part of the
alphabet. The only kase in which 'c' would be retained would be the
'ch' formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform
'w' spelling, so that 'which' and 'one' would take the same konsonant,
wile Year 3 might well abolish 'y' replasing it with 'i' and Iear 4
might fiks the 'g/j' anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the
improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with
useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and
the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud
fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez 'c', 'y' and 'x'
-- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais
'ch', 'sh', and 'th' rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov
orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt
xe Ingliy-spiking werld."
> The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility.
> As part of the negotiations, the British and American government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement. Consequently, they have adopted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as European English (Euro for short). In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c."
> Sertainly sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also the hard "c" will be replased with "k." Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.
> There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the second year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replased by "f." This will make words like "fotograf" 20 persent shorter.
> In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expected to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will encourage the removal of double leters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful and they woud go.
> By the fourth year peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" by "z" and "w" by "v." During ze fifz yer, ze unesasary "o" kan be droped from vords containing "ou", and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinatins of leters.
> Und after ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German lik zey vonted in ze first plas.
I never knew it was based on a Mark Twain quote. Then again, Mark Twain's philosophy I didn't hear much of either (I'm from Europe, don't think I learned any American philosophy on high school).
"fotograf" is precisely how it is spelt in Czech and I am not sure why the English language insists on keeping the ancient-looking "ph" in those words; what the phreaking phuck?
Ancient-looking to you perhaps; but an invention of the Etruscans and Romans (writing the aspirated "p" that they took from Classical Greek as "ph", hence the Romanized name of the letter "phi") and not in fact as ancient as the Phoenician digamma "f" that you are using. (-:
Well, German (among others) does this as well in many cases, and it's otherwise far more phonetic than English in orthography. It's not some unique Anglo insistence, in this case.
> > In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expected to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will encourage the removal of double leters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful and they woud go.
Theodore Roosevelt tried to impose simplified spelling on the Government Printing Office. Congress refused to fund any such printing, and TR's innovation took effect.
People make a fuss about irregular verbs or grammar or whatever but what really makes learning languages hard is the very long tail of words you need to know. The grammar is a comparatively very small amount of content.
When we think about how "easy" a language is a lot of it is how likely it is for us to guess from our native language what any given difficult word means -- "geografía" is more obvious to an English speaker than 地理).
Esperanto helps with that by being polysynthetic and allowing you to attach suffixes to extend words (agglutination)
For instance:
good - bon+e (-e makes adverb)
bad - mal+bon+e (mal- is like un-)
very bad - mal+bon+eg+e (-eg- intensifies)
to make bad - mal+bon+ig+i (-ig- makes active, -i makes a verb)
to make worse - pli+mal+bon+ig+i (pli- means more)
you can also string roots together like in German: man+sak+o = hand+bag+noun suffix = purse/handbag.
this, and the familiarity of the roots to Indo-European speakers, makes Esperanto very fast for Europeans to learn. a small number of roots and good grammar gives you a lot of return on your time.
The ability to guess plausible meanings if great for comprehending the words, but for speaking them? I’ve guessed „Spoonen” instead of „Löffel”; “live”, “liver”, “love” translated as the equally homophonic „Leben“, „Leber“, „Liebe“; and Siri regularly fails to know if I am trying to say „höher“ or „Hure“ (only one of the latter words is even in Duolingo).
Well, it's better than nothing, and if you're doing the producing you can simply stick to words you already know and avoid more difficult ones. In many cases you can come up with a plausible guess by applying regular patterns (e.g., -phy to -fia or -gy to -gia going from English to Spanish).
That's part of it, but another way vocabulary can be easy is if it is self-documenting meaning you can figure out the meaning without memorizing it specifically. The Chinese 地理 is literally "Earth Science" (a term also used in English but with a broader meaning of all sciences dealing with the earth including geology and geophysics as well as geography) . Spanish "geografía" means "earth description" but isn't as self-documenting because to recognize this you have to go outside the language to Ancient Greek.
Well in Japanese it's the same word but now you have to know all about Chinese for Japanese words, not to mention learning to write the characters, which is just a big hurdle you don't have to worry about with Western languages. And beyond that, yeah, Spanish words you might need to know about Greek and Latin morphemes but my point is those exact same ones are all over our language already so they're familiar. I already know that "geo-" means "Earth" and "co-" means "together" from my native language.
Yeah, I've always wanted to learn a language, but was frustrated by all the grammar irregularities and other barriers to entry. English has that in spades, but it wasn't a problem as you don't have to worry about that with your first language.
Esperanto was the first language I've made any real progress with. Spanish is considered a fairly easy language for English speakers to learn, but I knew fairly little after 3 years of study in school. I've put in substantially less Esperanto effort, but am far more confident. I actually believe I could become fluent if I continued to focus on it. When someone (even with an accent) speaks, I can understand the sounds and spell the words no problem. It isn't perfect, but I find learning it fun and not frustrating. The community is also vibrant.
It's probable that Esperanto speakers speak more clearly because:
a) that's the purpose of speaking the language, and,
b) there are few conversations between two fully fluent speakers; even if you are fluent, you can't expect your conversation partner to be.
Spanish does have phonetic spelling, but is also likely to have more elision in every-day speech.
Native speakers know and use what is understood without needing to be said, from non-verbal cues.
I can understand some Esperanto videos where the speaker is extremely fluent and talking very fast. If I could slow down the videos, I could transcribe almost the full thing even if I don't know all the vocabulary. That is impressive to me. There are a lot of languages that just sound like gibberish to me to the point that I can't even make out the sounds that well.
Pretty much every other language has regular spelling, and many have very regular grammar. English is the exception, being a Frankenstein assemblage of languages.
> Pretty much every other language has regular spelling
That may be true for Chinese or Japanese phonetic alphabets (e.g. pinyin, bopomofo, hiragana, katakana, etc.) but literacy demands mastery of characters as well.
Although many characters have phonetic elements, it is essentially impossible to know how to write a word correctly in hanzi/kanji without knowing the component characters.
Among European languages, French seems to have challenging spelling, and there appear to be spelling bees for foreign learners at least. Dutch also seems to have had a spelling/dictation contest until recently.
I was always under the impression that this was the intent and was trying to imply that English was basically bastardized German. Is that not what Twain meant?
No, Twain was satirising the whole ridiculous idea that trying to regularise the spelling of English is a good idea.
English has homonyms and homophones in part because it is always open to taking words from other languages. In fact "We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
Any attempt to force English to be strictly 'pronounced as written' will fail in the future even if it succeeds in the present because someone will import a word from another language that sounds like an existing word or invent a new one unaware that a word of the same pronunciation already exists or just attach a new meaning to an existing word.
That argument makes no sense. English is far from alone in borrowing heavily from other languages. Loanwords are one of the most obvious cases of linguistic contact and can be found everywhere throughout the world. There are multiple ways how a language can deal with such loanwords: they can keep the original spelling, making those words an irregular exception to the pronunciation rules, or they can adapt the spelling and pronunciation to the borrowing language, or anything in between. Often it starts as the former and at some point migrates towards the latter.
Meanwhile, there is absolutely no reason why English couldn't in principle have a much more phonetic or regular spelling system, except maybe dialectal variation (which you also do have in other languages with more regularised spelling, though).
Now the larger reason for why a huge spelling reform would fail is because it would be a massive continuity break: people would have to relearn, new spellings would appear totally unnatural, it would mean that past text would at some point start being incomprehensible, etc., so I don't think there is any practical way of getting there.
> There are multiple ways how a language can deal with such loanwords: they can keep the original spelling, making those words an irregular exception to the pronunciation rules...
Isn't that the point? IIRC, English was originally about 50/50 Saxon and French - most of the fancy / unintuitive / rule-breaking words are French loan words (e.g., "rendezvous" & "accomplice" are French, "loan" is old Norse, "word" is old English). The combination happened when Britain spent a while under Norman rule. The commoners were largely Saxon & Norse, the rulers were French. Eventually the languages simply merged, with grammar rules and vocabulary taken from both sides.
I believe the first edition of the Webster dictionary in the 1800s was when the spelling was standardized. At that point, Webster looked at the original language of the words to both define them and figure out a correct spelling.
The "English creole" hypothesis has been discussed a lot and it is true that English is a bit special within Europe in having absorbed a lot of material from other languages such as French and Norse, but I still think that it is very recognisable as a Germanic language (both grammatically as well as from the perspective of "core vocabulary"), so I don't think that the languages "merged" in the same way as this maybe happened in the case of some recognised creoles. (See e.g. here for a summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypoth...)
There is still no reason in principle why English couldn't have chosen a more regular system of spelling, especially at a time where literacy was low anyway. The idea that the spelling is irregular because you have several competing systems (French vs. Anglo-Saxon vs. Norse) might sound compelling, but I don't think it holds water, cf. homographs such as "sow" (female pig) and "sow" (to plant) which both have Old English origins.
(Also I don't think that "rendez-vous" is a good example. I don't have hard evidence, but I would find it entirely implausible that this is a word of Norman origin, it's much more likely to be a late import from the 18th or 19th century, when French was fashionable, not at all comparable to something like "pork".)
> There is still no reason in principle why English couldn't have chosen a more regular system of spelling, especially at a time where literacy was low anyway.
I mentioned that farther downthread. The original Webster's dictionary served exactly this purpose - in the early 1800s, his stated goal (IIRC) was to give the new USA a standardized language to help differentiate it from the country they'd split off from. Also mentioned downthread, he based his standardization on the languages the words were loaned from.
You ignored the part of my comment where I showed that English spelling is inconsistent even between words that have purely Old English origins. I really don't think your hypothesis holds water. The chaotic spelling of English is a historical coincidence and not some necessary consequence of how the English spoken language developed.
There has to be a rule for rules to broken. English orthography is practically irregular (although it's vaguely, chaotically regular if you subject each word to an analysis based on most probable language origin.) Figuring out how to pronounce a word you haven't seen before in English is only slightly easier than trying to figure out how to pronounce a word you haven't seen before in Mandarin.
> Isn't that the point? IIRC, English was originally about 50/50 Saxon and French - most of the fancy / unintuitive / rule-breaking words are French loan words (e.g., "rendezvous" & "accomplice" are French, "loan" is old Norse).
Also, it's far worse than this. The Normans changed the spelling of English words that were unpronounceable to them by adding a bunch of letters. One I remember is that the reason the "-shire" suffix is confusing is because before the Normans it was just "-scr".
Also, British English tends to Anglicize French pronunciations, like "herb," "valet," etc. French borrows aren't the major thing making English difficult to read and write. French orthography is also pretty bad (and Portuguese.)
> There has to be a rule for rules to broken. English orthography is practically irregular (although it's vaguely, chaotically regular if you subject each word to an analysis based on most probable language origin.)
I mean, yeah. The rules governing English are a combination of the rules governing a couple other languages. Divide up the vocabulary according to the applicable rules, and I'm pretty sure you end up with a fragment each of the French, Saxon, Norse, etc. languages, and within those fragments the rules make as much sense as they do in the full versions of the respective languages. E.g.: put "rendezvous" & "accomplice" in one pile, "loan" in another, and the rules of each pile would be internally consistent, and consistent with the rules of French and Norse respectively...accounting for language drift, of course.
A large fraction of English follows French rules - might as well ask the French language to fix their spellings to make phonetic sense. The work put into that would translate directly to fix a lot of English.
> Also, it's far worse than this. The Normans changed the spelling of English words that were unpronounceable to them by adding a bunch of letters. One I remember is that the reason the "-shire" suffix is confusing is because before the Normans it was just "-scr".
Personally, given the entymology of English, it makes a lot of sense to preserve the original, applicable, rules of the languages English is comprised of. Otherwise, it would be like rewriting either Norse or French to fit the other - as you mention, that's even worse than the combination of languages in the first place.
Many more phonetic writing systems re-write loanwords to match local pronunciation, at least once the words are established enough.
For example, in Romanian, recent borrows do typically preserve the original spelling (e.g. English 'computer','mall' -> Romanian 'computer', 'mall'; plausible Romanian phonetic spelling 'compiutăr','mol'). But older loan-words that have become established take on a phonetic spelling (e.g. French 'bureau' -> Romanian 'birou'; English 'interview', 'tramway', 'jam' -> Romanian 'interviu', 'tramvai', 'gem').
So it is possible to absorb large amounts of loan-words into a language and completely disregard the orthography of the original language. I don't think you lose much by doing that, in fact.
That's true. I guess what I didn't really say explicitly is that I don't think there is a 'local pronunciation' in the case of English. French and Saxon seem to have merged on equal terms, where neither was sufficiently dominant to determine how words were re-written, and neither vocabulary would be counted as loan words.
I think English would claim both as the original languages.
> French orthography is also pretty bad (and Portuguese.)
Actually, french orthography is a bit complex, but pretty regular (if you exclude some old names). Also, French grammar would be more complex if the spelling was more inline with pronunciation, as the grammar rules have changed slower than pronunciation has.
If you went by current pronunciation, the feminine or sometimes plural forms of many words, and the tenses of many verbs, would add random consonants, while the current spelling shows that they simply "revive" a consonant that is now elided, but has stayed part of the root of the word (e.g. 'present/presente' pronounced something like 'prezan/prezant'; 'mis/mise' pronounced something like 'mi/miz').
French spelling is also an interesting showcase of what happens when a phonetic spelling is frozen while pronunciation changes (Old French was almost 1:1 with today's spelling, but pronunciation has changed dramatically).
As a non-native English speaker, the bigger problem to me are not homophones, but homographs that aren't homophones. Or in general, same groupings of letters that are pronounced differently. That aside, there's a bunch of words that have been imported from English to Polish that mess me up (I'm getting tripped by the Polish pronunciation, it bleeds into how I speak the word). Grammar is actually great to learn (same goes for Spanish based on my limited experience with it).
Agree, I would add, make vocals consistent, ‘a’,‘e’,‘i’,’o’,’u’ should only have one sound per each letter for every case, if we need more vocal sounds then use different characters.
The vowels in the English language: bat, bait, bet, beet, bit, bite, bot, boat, but, butte, bout, boil, book, the 'a' in about (/ə/), baht. That's only in my dialect, and not counting r-colored vowels (which are not r-colored in British dialects!).
This list was constructed by building short/long vowel pairs, and then tacking on the weirder vowels afterwards. As you'll notice from the inclusion of the last entry, there is a major dialect issue here. There are four sounds (/æ/, /ɒ/, /ɑ/, /ɔ/) that are usually distributed into three sounds in major dialects, and these arise from short a and short o in written orthography... but which words send their vowels to the different targets varies greatly depending on the dialect. If you pick it according to any one dialect, you're going to get some poor correlation in another dialect.
The other obvious issue is that adding new characters is actually difficult in the modern age. Of the sounds I've dropped in above, I can only type in ə and æ without resorting to copy-paste, and that's only because those are accessible with the Compose key. Telling people that you have to use 10 keys not present on their keyboards to write their language is going to be a hard sell. Again, note that English dropped þ as a letter primarily because it wasn't possible to print with printing presses imported from Germany.
Problem with English is that there are a lot of vowels (up to about 20) and the number varies greatly based on dialect. I believe this is an outlier for Indo-European languages.
I’m also from a country with such a language, and as a kid I couldn’t understand the concept of spelling bee competitions in American movies, like, what’s even the point?
Interesting.... as a Portuguese speaker, I'd say that it gets progressively easier to read. Note that portuguese has way more coherent writing than english.
While english was simplified quite a bit in the recent 100+ (probably more) years and is often seen as a "simple" language there are quite many languages which are much more coherent then english.
E.g. recently there had been an article on hacker news about bilingual people which are fine in one language but have a writing-disorder in english. Likely due to it being less coherent.
> E.g. recently there had been an article on hacker news about bilingual people which are fine in one language but have a writing-disorder in english. Likely due to it being less coherent.
Also, there is no equivalent of a "spelling bee" in most other languages. Being able to spell all words is not seen as an exceptional skill in most languages written in the Latin script.
I was unironically able to read that but it would probably be better if everyone learned IPA just for fun to use for all languages and see if people find it useful or not. If it's not useful it will die out.
IPA is great for writing down how people speak, but I don't think that's the most important aspect to capture for most writing. An example where this might be useful is the dialogue in Twain's novels, where he would often try to capture the particulars of his characters dialects.
But for most writing the goal is to share meaning, not voice. What would we do for a word like `data`, which has at least 5 different pronunciations that I've heard. Accepting all of them would probably lead to the opposite of the goal. Picking one leads to the same controversy.
Add to that people often aren't aware of their own pronunciation. Personal example is that in my dialect I have the fool/full merger. I wasn't aware of this, I simply heard the language other people spoke as I pronounced it. At university I literally didn't believe people who were telling me that they pronounce those words differently. I just couldn't hear it.
> "A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling: For ex...
That makes no sense, because it is not solving the problem with the English language pronunciation.
To solve pronunciation you have 2 options:
1. Set on 1 pronunciation for any syllable and stick with it. Throw away old pronunciations.
e.g. Arkansas sounds like "are + Kansas"
2. Word by word, re-write it in a way that fits its sound.
e.g. Kansas becomes Kensas and Arkansas becomes Arkanso. Or something like that, I do not get English pronunciation at all.
But, I understand that is not sociable possible. It follows the same logic that using the Imperial system. As we grow old, we like what we know, and we hate that people forces us to learn new things. So, changing how millions communicate would be very difficult.
I see more plausible a come back of Esperanto than to change how English is written or spoken.
You're talking about a nation that has been rolling out a sensible system of measurement units for decades. By 2020 it has made its way into engineering schools, but is still nowhere near the daily usage level. Surely the entire language will take a multiple of that. I think we should extend your plan to a few centuries.
"A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling: For example, in Year 1 that useless letter 'c' would be dropped to be replased either by 'k' or 's', and likewise 'x' would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which 'c' would be retained would be the 'ch' formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform 'w' spelling, so that 'which' and 'one' would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish 'y' replasing it with 'i' and Iear 4 might fiks the 'g/j' anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez 'c', 'y' and 'x' -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais 'ch', 'sh', and 'th' rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."