Is it time to reform the English language?

[steven1mac]

The English language has a long and proud heritage, however as time passes the spoken language has deviated from the written. The language has also kept most of the spelling of foreign words it has incorporated over its history, which can make learning the language more difficult. If you were to to reform it how would you do it?

[Q-T_3.14.exe]

Make english more french. Francization of english was left undone.

[Ulfrinn]

Reform it how?

If I were to do it I would start by simplifying spelling and reverting to pre vowel shift pronunciations, which would make pronunciation and spelling more phonetic and more consistent. If you see "ou" in the middle of a sentence, it's prounced the same.

There's also a lot of redundancies in having same pronunciations for different letters, part of this is because of the change in pronunciations through the above mentioned period, like gh, in some words being pronounced like an F.

[Xero_Daxter]

Erm, what the sigma?

Edit: I think the English language is fine. There are some things I would change. The word “near miss”. They didn’t nearly miss; they “nearly hit”.

[steven1mac]

Originally posted by Ulfrinn:

Reform it how?

Spelling would be a good start, get rid of the silent letters for example.

[pants]

Change the script to something that can handle the bizarre phonology, but also something entirely unreadable. That's the ideal upgrade IMO.

[ZZZZZ]

while it needs reforming to stay as world language we could also just simply replace it with a way cooler language

[Ulfrinn]

Originally posted by steven1mac:

Originally posted by Ulfrinn:

Reform it how?

Spelling would be a good start, get rid of the silent letters for example.

I added more to my post. I've actually studied a lot of the history of a few language groups, especially the Germanic language groups and how English evolved. It's not impossible.

[Ulfrinn]

To give some examples of some of the changes the language went through, the word "light" for example, used to sound very different. the -ght letters would have been pronounced very similarly to the -cht letters in German. Which means at one point English "light" and German "licht," both meaning the same thing, would have been pronounced the same.

Similarly, the original English word for "you" was "þu" I'm not sure if this first character displays correctly, but it should look like a lowercase p and b together. the symbol "þ" later became "th" when English adopted the roman alphabet, which didn't have a letter to represent the dental fricative "th" sound that English has. "þu" would have had a short dental fricative sound and a "long u" sound. Pretty similar to it's German cousin meaning the same thing "du."

Once the Roman alphabet was adopted, this word got rewritten to "thou" which is often mispronounced, it still would have been pronounced the same. It eventually got combined with the word "ye" which is a plural version of the word, into the singular "you." But the original "long u" form of the "ou" vowel pair remained, but in other words, it got changed. Words like couch, pouch, slouch.

This all happened around the 1400's, a period known as the "great vowel shift." So technically to "fix" English, you have to undo that. And if you undo that, you're going to be diving deeply into Old English and adopting some standardizations that were originally founded along with the language. That doesn't mean you have to teach Old English, or start spelling "what" as "hwæt." But, technically in that word, the H is pronounced, it did come first. Stewie Griffin was right. But you do have to de-shift the vowels and that might force some spelling changes.

[Dracoco OwO]

Long and proud is not what i would say.

[steven1mac]

Originally posted by Dracoco OwO:

Long and proud is not what i would say.

They could always toss the French influence, if that would you make it feel better, but incorporation words and ideas from other languages can a strength. A language that refuses to evolve will become stagnant.

[Dracoco OwO]

Originally posted by steven1mac:

Originally posted by Dracoco OwO:

Long and proud is not what i would say.

They could always toss the French influence, if that would you make it feel better, but incorporation words and ideas from other languages can a strength. A language that refuses to evolve will become stagnant.

What English need is an organic change in it's structure, this always come naturaly with time, you could always revisit older terms in English, they seem fine by me, besides you can't throw away like 50% of your language.

[Ulfrinn]

Originally posted by steven1mac:

Originally posted by Dracoco OwO:

Long and proud is not what i would say.

They could always toss the French influence, if that would you make it feel better, but incorporation words and ideas from other languages can a strength. A language that refuses to evolve will become stagnant.

The only problem is, a lot of the words we incorporated, we already had versions of, which is why now you have so many words in English that just mean the same thing, or only exist to increase the vocabulary, when other words, or compounding.

[vkobe]

Originally posted by steven1mac:

The English language has a long and proud heritage, however as time passes the spoken language has deviated from the written. The language has also kept most of the spelling of foreign words it has incorporated over its history, which can make learning the language more difficult. If you were to to reform it how would you do it?

nope, too much words to change and it will become new language and i am not so sure average joe going to be happy if you mess with his language

[Dracoco OwO]

Originally posted by Ulfrinn:

Originally posted by steven1mac:

They could always toss the French influence, if that would you make it feel better, but incorporation words and ideas from other languages can a strength. A language that refuses to evolve will become stagnant.

The only problem is, a lot of the words we incorporated, we already had versions of, which is why now you have so many words in English that just mean the same thing, or only exist to increase the vocabulary, when other words, or compounding.

This on itself is not really an issue some words are just context sensitive, but English just isn't quite like that structurally, variety i feel doesn't truly hurt a language.

[vkobe]

Originally posted by ZZZZZ:

while it needs reforming to stay as world language we could also just simply replace it with a way cooler language

force people to learn to code computer program 🤗