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If you can remember anything more about that I’d be really interested, as langauge reform is a big interest of mine. As far as I’m aware, there’s been no successful langauge reform in Britain, and even the few attempts (George Bernard Shaw’s simplified spelling society and a labour MP in the 50s who failed to pass a bill in Parliament) were all for simplyfing and regularising English spelling (so that ‘give’ would become ‘giv’, because it doesn’t rhyme with five, hive, dive, etc) not re-Latinizing anything.

The last significant change in English spelling I can think of was when Webster introduced his “American” spelling in the 19th century and changed ‘honour’, ‘centre’, etc to their US versions.

I totally agree that this is something that happens naturally, and probably shouldn’t be interfered with by a government. When it has been successful, it has been about giving permission for official langauge to reflect current usage. Telling people they must write ‘hav’ instead of ‘have’ is not going to work because even if it’s illogical it’s such a high frequency word that it is minimal effort to add, and then ignore, the ‘e’. But allowing school children to start writing ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’ might actually work.

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porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

But allowing school children to start writing ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’ might actually work.

Indeed, I think the kinds of simplifications which we already naturally use in casual writing, like ‘thru’ or ‘tho’, might take off if they were allowed, unlike changes imposed from above.

(Great comment btw!)

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vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
As I understand it it was less so a matter of direct spelling changes and was moreso a matter of “correcting” pronunciation of school children. While it’s generally failed every generation or two it seems the English face some version, the most notable being the shifter of how to pronounce solder so as to pronounce the L. Though that one in particular may just be people not knowing how to say it as well.

Also as an aside Webster simply documented the most common spellings of words at the time, while he definitely had an impact on a lot of the spelling most of it was pretty well spread by the point he published his dictionary. Printing presses charged by the letter so superfluous letters generally got abandoned namely the U in a lot of words since it generally doesn’t effect inflection in American English, I’ve also seen variants wherein silent Ls and Ks were dropped though most of those ones didn’t stick probably because nife just kinda looks wrong.

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