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Comment by dctoedt | Hacker News Reader

It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent:

+ The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca.

+ For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as a global lingua franca, but "misspellings" should be tolerated as well as discussed at length in the comments here.)

+ We should accept usages such as "childs," vice children, and "it's" as a possessive, as being proper English and not mistakes. (English as a Second Language teachers could doubtless come up with a long list of such "mistakes.")

Such an approach to achieving a common global tongue would be more likely to succeed than was seen with Esperanto.

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> It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent

This is how languages evolve already. Mistakes become accepted over time.

The problem with "turning it up to 11" (or not offering mistakes any resistance before giving in to them; being conservative about it helps to single out the most persistent ones, working as natural selection of sorts)... is that not all the learners will make the same mistakes.

> English as a Second Language teachers could doubtless come up with a long list of such "mistakes."

Exactly, it would be a very long list. And much dependent on the background of the learner (aka their first language). What'd be obvious and easy for me as a Pole is not necessarily the same for a Spaniard.

Meaning this approach would lead to further diversification, rather than unification of the language.

> "misspellings" should be tolerated as well

As a non-native speaker, I'm pretty sure that widespread acceptance for spelling mistakes would pose more difficulty for me in the long run.

It is way easier for a native speaker to see past them.

So, while your mileage may vary, I, for one, vote thanks but no thanks :)

> As a non-native speaker, I'm pretty sure that widespread acceptance for spelling mistakes would pose more difficulty for me in the long run.

GP here. You and @maginary make an interesting point, namely that standardized spelling helps non-native speakers. The problem with English is that much of our existing standardized spelling is quite non-intuitive to pronounce, e.g., rough, through, thorough. Perhaps some kind of spelling reform as discussed by @philipps and @jherdman below would help, although other comments here also discuss the problems that have arisen with such efforts.

Aside from V-2 already commented on, I'd like to add that spelling mistakes such as

> "it's" as a possessive

are mostly native-speaker exclusive. Your/you're, there/their, etc. spelling mistakes you just don't see non native speakers make. This is because they're just that, spelling mistakes.

So while native speakers know what they mean but it's just associated with a sound in their head, they just write out that sound. Non natives on the other hand usually think about the grammar, the right word, etc. I don't think I've ever met a non-native speaker that makes the there/their mistake e.g.

another example is "would of" instead of "would've."

Or "except" where "accept" was meant

English is refactored quite frequently. I'm by no means an expert, but here are some observations.

* American English could be considered one such refactoring. Some common changes include: removing vowels without sound (e.g. "labour" => "labor", "colour" => "color"), removing duplicate letters ("programme" => "program"), and reversing some "re" words (e.g. "theatre" => "theater"). More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo... * The printing press introduced some too. The best example I can think of is the general removal of diaereses (e.g. "microörganism" => "microorganism"). Though I'm less certain of this one.

I'm a little surprised none of the gamer speak refactorings haven't made their way into the written word in a serious way, especially given their prevalence in such a large portion of the population.

I wonder whether it has converted into less spelling mistakes committed by AE users (in comparison to BE users)... Obviously, controlling for variables such as level of education and the like... Have there been any studies on the subject?

German speaking countries went through an effort to reduce the most obvious spelling exceptions in 1996. It introduced new spelling for many existing words but also allowed the use of the previous spelling to continue (in effect creating the situation OP describes where different options are equally valid). I lived in Germany at the time and remember a lot of resistance and confusion after the changes went through. Also, some of the leading newspapers defined their own in-house rules (based on valid interpretation of the official rules).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of...

Classic example of the "big redesign in the sky". Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

Can I make a wish? As a non-native speaker it would be great to have a consistent alphabet, it wouldn't matter the order of the letters, a letter would always correspond to a single sound, specially with vocals. If the Latin alphabet is not suitable for this then it would be great to have a new alphabet or maybe just the Latin one but with some letters added.

This is basically impossible for English, since for many vowels, the various dialects map the diaphonemes of English into mutually incompatible sets of phonemes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... (and even that chart is underestimating the differences - tour and moor definitely have different phonemes in en-AU, even though they are allegedly from the same diaphoneme.

If you had a conservative spelling system, where each diaphoneme was mapped to a single letter, speakers of dialects with many merges (e.g. American English) would struggle to spell correctly, since they would be unable to distinguish several letters apart. If you had a simplified system, then most speakers would get confused by merges that existed in the spelling system but not in their own dialects; and speakers of more conservative dialects wouldn't be able to write sounds that are to them different.

How about the international phonetic alphabet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

IPA is such an alphabet.

(It's too late to revise my original post:) By tolerating and collecting "mistakes" in English, I have in mind the same approach as waiting to lay some of the sidewalks on a new campus until it becomes clear where the actual traffic will be, as opposed to insisting that everyone walk only on the pre-planned sidewalks.

the parents idea is totally bonkers, who needs abostrophes anyway ...

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