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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 25 of 72 06 April 2010 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
So you basically want Chinese, but with French words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MarcoDiAngelo Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 6447 days ago 208 posts - 345 votes Speaks: Serbian*, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Thai, Polish | Message 26 of 72 06 April 2010 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
I disagree. For example, you have every important Russian literary work re-printed with new orthography rules. Every literate person can read them and you have children who don't have to memorize "yat-words" and you also don't have to write many unnecessary letters. Isn't that better than it was before? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robsolete Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5385 days ago 191 posts - 428 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 27 of 72 06 April 2010 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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English grammar reform:
Destroy as many irregular verbs as possible without causing mass confusion. "To be" isn't going to become regularized anytime soon, but saying "I buyed a new car" sounds a bit odd, but only because of habit. Nothing really wrong with it in my opinion. Get up, get down, get across, get ahead, get through, etc. etc. etc. While these are fun colloquial verbal phrases for natives, they act as some bizarre code to crack for foreign learners. We need to take these terms out of our business/formal speech and officially relegate them to colloquial or literary idioms. Developing the habit of saying "awakening," "ducking" (or dancing), "transversing" (or explaining), "progressing," and "enduring" isn't going to kill us. It will just make us sound smarter and save headaches for everyone else. Got it? As far as English orthography goes, well, just because there's a standard doesn't mean everyone is going to follow it in speech. Turkish writing is pretty phonemic but that doesn't stop Turkish speakers from having regional accents. Maybe use the old-fashioned "Transatlantic" accent as a phonemic base for international communication, and let dialects be dialects? The argument against spelling reform for the sake of dialects is essentially saying "we shouldn't fix this problem because we can't fix every problem at once." And frankly the orthographic reform doesn't have to be a huge ordeal. Some of our consonants are certainly redundant, but my experience with ESL learners is that this does not really present a huge problem. It's the lack of clear rules for vowels. Maybe we just need to add a few extra vowels (or even just add umlats and other marks to existing ones) and call it a day. Leave the consonants alone, figure out a compromise spelling to be the "International Standard" and let people pronounce things how they want to in the comfort of their own communities, so long as they have SOME reliable written standard to base things off of in the interational sphere. And speaking as a Yankee on the "room" vs. "rum" question, I think the latter has to do with the confusion, as our Puritanical reserve tends to give us rather pitiful alcohol tolerance once we hit Bourbon Street. Edited by robsolete on 06 April 2010 at 10:48pm 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 28 of 72 07 April 2010 at 1:15am | IP Logged | |||||
This seems more understandable. But not to make English orthography completely phonetic, as the OP suggested.
If our orthography changes and it is phonetic, it seems to follow that our pronunciations of these words would, perhaps after a generation or two, converge. 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 29 of 72 07 April 2010 at 1:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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I just found this on Wikipedia.
As dialects of the English language vary significantly, it would be difficult to create a phonemic orthography that encompassed all of them. However, it is fairly easy to create one based on a standard accent such as Received Pronunciation. This would, however, exclude certain sound differences found in other accents, such as the bad-lad split in Australian English. With time, pronunciations change and spellings become out of date, as has happened to English and French. In order to maintain a phonemic orthography such a system would need periodic updating, as has been attempted by various language regulators and proposed by other spelling reformers. 1 person has 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 30 of 72 07 April 2010 at 2:15am | IP Logged | |||||
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Chinese, Japanese, Korean: 漢字統一
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| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5448 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 31 of 72 07 April 2010 at 2:49am | IP Logged | |||||
Haha, that happens to be something I am completely against. Nothing personal, just my feelings! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5352 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 32 of 72 07 April 2010 at 3:04am | IP Logged | |||||
I would find this to be counterproductive, since these same irregular verbs have similar changes in Dutch, German, etc. This is just one of the characteristics of the Germanic languages, among others such as the limited amount of true tenses, etc. I personally am against an English spelling reform. As others have pointed out in this thread, there are so many dialects of English, and there are also so many varying ways of pronouncing English words. As such, I know that I do not particularly want to be spelling words based off of the pronunciation of some other faceless person, whom I do not know (or necessarily agree with). Someone else had mentioned the various German spelling reforms over the years. From what I understand, the situation is quite a mess. When I was in Germany, I had a German professor who was about 31 years old, who insisted on spelling words the way he was taught in school. For instance, he would write "daß" though I was taught to spell it as "dass" when I learned German in 2006. And there is only a 7 year age gap between the two of us! The fact of the matter is that many of those who learned the old way of spelling, do not want to re-learn how to spell everything, and then we end up in a situation where no one is quite sure what the "correct standard" of writing is. No thanks, I really do not need to see that in English. Another thing which had really annoyed me was when I learned that some Germanic languages (I think Dutch was one, maybe Danish also) used to capitalize all of the nouns, following suit with German, but this rule was changed to distance these languages from German, I am guessing during the war. Not really a spelling reform, but a slight grammar change, which I dislike, as it makes the languages not as user-friendly for a learner. That leads me to my final point. If I had to choose a language that needs a spelling reform, it would be Danish. If I had to guess, I believe that Danish is for me as English is to those which learn it as a foreign language. I've lost practically all desire to learn Danish, now favouring Norwegian or Swedish, since they offer more phonetic spelling. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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