Comment on American and British English spelling and pronunciations
Lemmist@lemm.ee 2 days agono one wants to compromise
I doubt that. Appetite comes during the meal as they say in my culture. Just start and you’ll be amazed how people would welcome ADEQUATE changes.
Going by how ortography changes have gone in other languages, I doubt it.
Besides English, if English fix its ortography it’s going to become much harder to learn for speakers of other European languages - as confusing the pronunciation rules and exceptions are, they are caused by writing things similarly to other European languages while mangling the original pronunciation.
No, that’s a weak excuse. Nobody cares about the etymology of the word. It doesn’t help much for a Frenchman that 12 words in the whole English language are written the same way as in French. But ALL people (English native-speakers included) will profit from predictable spelling and pronunciation.
As a native Portuguese speaker I found it very useful when I started to learn English. And even nowadays having some form of “visual map” between English and Portuguese at least for more erudite words - which tend to be the ones that are shared between more languages - helps me write English better.
The similarities between English and German also ended up helping me learn German.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
A silly colloquialism isn’t indicative of success. If you tell people to do something they don’t want to they’re not going to decide they actually like it later on.
There’s just no fucking way most Australians would decide to discard the current spelling of words in favor of the American spelling. I feel certain American’s feel the same about British spelling.
Lemmist@lemm.ee 2 days ago
:)
All English dialects are a complete mess now. There won’t be Australian/British/American spelling. There will be a completely new spelling made by clever people, not by linguists. By people who can and want to make language bearable, not just clutching the status quo no matter what.
Look at Esperanto(before you might object about artificiality and widespread… Ukrainian also has that letter-sound bijection approach. Georgian as far as I know. I’m sure there are more) for example and see how convenient and logical can spelling be. Sometimes old things are so broken and outdated that you just throw them away and ask engineers to make a new thing. That’s why our cars don’t have 4 horse-based legs.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Sure mate. I’m sure the engineers will step in and fix all the language problems any day now.