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Reforms that you want to see in languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 33 of 72 07 April 2010 at 3:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Verbs don't start out irregular -- they start out regular and become irregular. Therefore
any attempt to make all verbs regular is futile. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| goosefrabbas Triglot Pro Member United States Joined 6368 days ago 393 posts - 475 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German, Italian Personal Language Map | Message 34 of 72 07 April 2010 at 4:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Agreed. Another reason I wouldn't like a reform is that it's easier to learn other Germanic languages by comparison, because many of Modern English's graphemes were the same (or correspond to separate ones) in Middle and Old English, even thought the pronunciations changed. Taken from The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer, pg. 66: This explains the behavior of our capricious GH, which is usually silent and sometimes like an f. It survives from a period when the pronunciation of light was more like the Scots licht in which there is a rasping sound presented by x in phonetic symbols. In such words the earlier English conventional GH sounds for a sound which was once common in the Teutonic languages, and is still common in German. When we meet GH, we know tat the word in which it occurs is a word * of Teutonic origin; and it is a safe bet that the equivalent German word will correspond closely to the Scots form. Thus the German for light is Licht, for brought brachte, for eight acht, for right Recht, and for might Macht. * Notable exceptions are haughty (French haut) and delight. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 35 of 72 07 April 2010 at 4:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say Chinese with French words, but the idea is interesting. I don't know much about Chinese grammar, but I've been told that it is quite simple. The idea behind these proposals is the fact that certain grammatical features seem to serve no real distinctive purpose. Let's take just one feature: grammatical gender. All French nouns are classified as masculine or feminine. We call this grammatical gender as opposed to logical gender because the gender classification is not based on any objective logic. There is nothing feminine about LA table or masculine about LE mur. Of course, things are different when referring to living creatures that are actually sexually differentiated. So, for probably 99% of French nouns, the LE/LA distinction is completely irrelevant, in that it adds no information. But, as we know, it is the foundation for a complex system of gender agreement with adjectives, predicates and participles. English does not have this feature, unlike most Western languages. Of course, English-speakers learning French know how complex the system is. As a teacher of French, I tell my students that the only reason for the existence of this system is tradition. It is an arbitrary, complicated system that serves no real purpose.If it serves no purpose, why not get rid of it? Edited by s_allard on 07 April 2010 at 3:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| oz-hestekræfte Senior Member Australia Joined 5678 days ago 103 posts - 117 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Danish | Message 36 of 72 07 April 2010 at 7:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well as for the bad-lad split, it doesn't really matter. It's not represented in writing now, and doesn't really need to be. Vowel length shouldn't matter too much in a spelling reform because getting it right in speech isn't a great barrier to being understood. It would not be all that hard to find a middle ground. Even if we don't start distinguishing between sounds like /aː/ and /æː/ here's what I think should change: Let's reform the spelling where we have lots of different vowel letters, randomly, to represent one sound. eg. Herd Fur Bird Word Heard* Hear Peer Wier *In the case of "Heard" This is an example of a word that could keep an irregular spelling (One that relates back to the stem of the verb "Hear") This would distinguish it from "Herd" One more reform I'd love to see is the letter Z used a lot more. There are so many places an S is currenlty used to represent the voiced Z sound. This might help our scandinavian friends to remember to pronounce it ;) Edited by oz-hestekræfte on 07 April 2010 at 7:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 37 of 72 07 April 2010 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm a descriptivist too, but I am theoretically in favour of spelling reform. How so? The dictionary. That's one of the reasons why English is in the state it's in. It seems paradoxical, but even thought the OED has always been descriptivist (and dictionaries such as Johnson's before it was the same) in spelling, it is not descriptivist in terms of orthography. What does that mean? Well, they collected words from distinct geographical areas with different orthographic conventions. The early dictionaries were therefore internally consistent, describing no single spelling system. BUT... the dictionary is used prescriptively, with editors deferring to it on matters of spelling. This means that writers that previously would have used internally consistent orthographies have instead used the inconsistent spellings of the dictionary, and natural change has been restricted. In a world of formal education and automated spell-checkers, natural change in orthography is harder than ever, so orthographic reform needs to be a deliberate process. As I've said before, the dialect thing is something of a red herring, because while dialects pronounce sounds differently, the alphabet does not give that level of precision anyway -- writing doesn't dictate the exact sound (phonetics), but it indicates which meaningful unit of sound (phoneme) to use which can then be rendered in the appropriate accent. Yes, there are some phonemic distinctions present in some dialects but not in others, but these are a minority. The idea of resplitting voiced and unvoiced TH is an obvious one. Standardising on either the French convention of voicing intervocalic S (hence -ize) and doubling to SS to obtain unvoiced /s/ or moving to Z would be useful too. But sorting out the vowels, as others have said, would be dead handy. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 38 of 72 07 April 2010 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I used to feel really strongly about this, but now it's just something that would be nice. Simplified characters used to really revolt me but one day a few months ago I somehow saw them anew from a more Chinese perspective and they didn't seem all that bad. Some of them even looked rather cool. The one simplified character I refuse to accept though is 爱. If they revert that back to 愛, then me and simplified characters are cool. haha That said, I am still in principle for Chinese character unification on the basis of traditional characters. It would make learning a second or third East Asian language somewhat easier and therefore foster East Asian integration, something of enormous importance for world peace and prosperity. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dantalian Diglot Senior Member Bouvet Island Joined 5682 days ago 125 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 39 of 72 07 April 2010 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I have some reasons to disagree with your disagreement. ;))
Not «every important Russian literary work» was actually reprinted but only those ones that Bolsheviks found to go together with their ideology. Mostly only those writers who had described the life of the poor could become «classics» and had the opportunity to be reprinted respectively. Many others were forgotten for decades or even forever.
Frankly, I don’t think that memorizing of those rules was so enormously hard to start a reform. Looks like, it is just a matter of several months of schooling for pupils to learn all the abolished rules. I believe the decision to begin a reform was stipulated for mostly political reasons. I personally can read old books but I cannot say that I really enjoy reading them. It is rather a kind of «ordeal» now. Then, I think the Russian language became poorer as a result of the reform. For example, we had two words for the current word «мир»(peace, world), namely «миръ» and «мiръ», each of them having its own meaning. And now we have just one extremely vague word «мир». Is it better? I don’t think English would be happy if somebody have decided to combine the words «peace» and «world» into a single new one for the sake of simplicity. Additionally, you can read (in Russian) the summary of some objections against the reform of 1918 on that page: http://koukhto.livejournal.com/517491.html?thread=1950323 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5448 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 40 of 72 08 April 2010 at 2:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree on that. I've recently discovered the beauty of simplified characters. I think the Japanese, who use Chinese characters here and there in the sentences, and the Koreans, who use them only for clarification of definitions, would not understand why simplified characters are useful until they do study Chinese. With that said, I do like the traditional characters more, just because they are more complex and fun to write, haha.
I agree that the learning would be a bit easier, but I don't think it would be that much easier than coming from a non-East Asian language background. After all, Japanese and Korean have no tones, and from what I've noticed the Hanja sounds of Korean often are not that readily recognizable with the original Chinese pronunciations, at least in Mandarin. And peace is important, but I guess the Japanese and we Koreans have our ethnic identities and cultures that we want to preserve as well, and one way to do that is through keeping the scripts of our language instead of replacing them with those of Chinese. I hope I didn't come across as a radical nationalist or racist... Edited by chucknorrisman on 08 April 2010 at 2:44am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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