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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

So how do we fix it? I remember Dutch having had a spelling reform at some point, and I'm pretty sure I've heard of similar things in both German and French. Does English (in any country or group of collaborating countries) have a standardization body or some volunteer group of people that might publish optional guidelines that people could follow?

Making it all consistent overnight would result in nobody being able to read (let alone write) the language anymore, but incremental tweaks that are gradual, obvious, and consistent could be doable.

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> So how do we fix it?

I don't think we can, at least not while preserving its value. For one, english started as basically a pidgin or creole from the british isles being invaded by so many groups over centuries, so we're not starting off at the best place. Two, the other examples of spelling reform I'm aware of are either from highly centralized places (the French empire), or small groups of countries that border each other (German spelling reform). There's not really a way to get the US, UK, India, and parts of Africa to agree on how something is pronounced (and therefore agree on what the proper spelling should be).

The only way to "fix" it would be to have each country (or region within a country potentially), reform the language in a different way, which would destroy most of the value of having so many people in disparate places speak that language and be able to communicate.

I don’t see why any of that means it can’t be reformed. No commonly-used language is formed in a vacuum.

It can be reformed. I specifically say that it can be.

My point is that, because you have so many disparate groups with completely different pronunciations (and therefore different target idealized spellings), reformation will destroy the majority of the value.

And nobody who actually speaks english has an interesting in destroying the value of understanding that language.

English is distinct in the sense that there is no one claiming authority over the language the way French Academy rules over French, or similar organizations in other languages. Simply put there is no right or wrong way to write English

> Simply put there is no right or wrong way to write English

Gud tu nou.

> Simply put there is no right or wrong way to write English

Yes, but this is true of literally every language. English is not special. This is Linguistics 101 stuff.

Friends don't let friends be prescriptivists.

> I remember Dutch having had a spelling reform at some point

Several. But for an easy grapheme-phoneme correspondence, you'd better look to Spanish. You can learn that in an hour or two.

> incremental tweaks

will slowly render older texts unreadable. Nobody (ok, almost nobody) can read old Dutch texts. Even 19th century Dutch is awkward to read.

German also has almost deterministic pronounciation rules. Italian too, except for the position of the stress.

German (as well as French) is mostly 1 : n. There is typically only one possible pronunciation for a written word (exceptions exist). But for a spoken word there can be several spellings. You need to learn which one is correct.

English is n:m, everything is possible and you just need to learn it.

Finnish is >99% 1:1. A native speaker can should be able to write each word correctly. In practice spelling errors do exist. Partly because in colloquial speach / dialects not all words are pronounced fully according to the rules. Partly because some people are just unable to apply the rules. Not being able to pronounce a written word seems mostly impossible.

However, foreigners should not think Finnish is easy for that reason. There are many sounds foreigners cannot pronounce correctly. And several pairs of sounds that foreigners' ears cannot distinguish.

Which Finnish sounds are difficult, would you say?

With previous experience of English, French, German and Spanish, when I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_phonology I don't feel intimiated like I do by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology or get the sense of dispair that I get from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_phonology

Is it broken?

Also, language is an evolving tool that we all co-own. If you want to see a change, modify how you write. People do this all the time. If it’s a good idea, maybe it’ll catch on.

> Is it broken?

Exactly: the the answer is an emphatic "No."

There is nothing to be fixed; to imagine that there is some sort of Platonic Ideal English is absurd on its face - and in even asking the question of quote-unquote fixing it, you can really see the HN-stereotype penchant for a clear set of rules showing through. Linguistics moved past this a hundred damned years ago.

Natural languages are not programming languages. There is no such thing as "correct"; as with any language, there is only such thing as the many-varied ways in which native speakers speak.

Even if "correct" isn't a valid term, we can care about consistency and ease of learning.

I think you're forgetting about the other natural-not-programming languages that have a writing system that corresponds to the spoken language.

It makes it significantly harder to learn. Whether you find that a benefit to keep others out or a thing to fix, is up to the beholder.

Much of the differences between British and American spellings are due to Webster's attempt at spelling reform in the early 19th century.

How is the only concrete possibility ranked at the very bottom of this subthread? Thanks! That at least gives some idea to how one might go about this and what effect it might have.

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