Spelling English

[*Aqua*]

@Newt

Of course Standard German is different to Basic English. I wanted to tell you what kind of approach we made in Germany. To sum it up: There are a lot of German dialects and varieties. Some of them differ so much to the others that people can't understand you. That's why a standard language was created which everybody has to learn.

In a way English has the same problem: There are several English speaking countries which each have several dialects or varieties. But instead of creating a standard language the approach is "Anything goes as long as you are understood." My opinion is that it doesn't work very good.

1. Do you agree on that?

So the question is, could the creation of some sort of Standard English work better? This Standard English would/should also serve as a lingua franca for the rest of the world.

Also what would be the properties of this language? More consistence between written and spoken language would be very nice for foreigners. But that also means that this new standard language would have major differences to the current English. (grammar, spelling, complexity)

2. Do you agree on that?

[Sidereus]

I think you're overstating how much difference there is to the various forms of English, and the problems these differences cause. There are some extremes, but generally the average fluent English speaker will be able to understand another average fluent English speaker, regardless of their national or regional origin. Accents cause more trouble than vocabulary or spelling. You have to start getting into pidgin languages or highly developed slang (i.e. Cockney rhyming slang) before two English speakers start having real trouble understanding each other.

Generally speaking, most non-native speakers just need to pick the form that works best for their circumstances (for instance, someone doing business with/living in Britain would do best to pick British English, etc.), and go with that, and they'll do all right. If a standardized form is REALLY needed, they exist, such as Simplified Technical English, which is the main standard for use in the aerospace industry.

As stated before, attempts to reform the English language almost always go nowhere. Too many people have their own version, and getting them all to agree on a single form is impossible, particularly when they're not unified under a single government as Germany was. So, "good enough" will have to do.

Edited February 14, 2015 by Sidereus

[Newt]

Aqua: Yes, to the first point. Maybe to the second one:

I am not confident that English is the best Lingua Franca, but as it is already, it would be simpler to tweak it than to replace it with some new language (even a simple one). This would probably consist of standardized spellings, punctuation. As regolith said, Accents cause more problems than grammar and vocabulary (there are some inconsistencies, y'all for instance, which is generally a regional term used in part of the US, but this is a minor challenge compared to trying to understand the accents of people from some areas). Thus, it migh be ideal to standardize pronunciation to reflect the spelling, as the other way would neccisarily result in many regional differences. Other areas could be changed to be more consistent as well, and there probably would need to be many proposed changes as some of them inevitably would not be accepted.

@regolith: Attempts to change English have indeed not generally gone very far, but the international challenge is not the only issue, German, while being named the same as a state, is not unique to that state, and other Europeans countries have also worked with the changes, both in deciding and implementing them. On the other hand, Moldova has avoided some changes in the Romanain language (which it uses), by declaring that there is a distinct language of Moldovan. The main difficulty will probably arise from teaching reformed English, and I can imagine that at least in the US any reforms would be attacked as 'evil federal intervention in our buisness' (wishing to not get too politically fired up, I shall leave it there).

[cpast]

To your first question: Among native speakers, English actually works rather well. "Anything goes so long as you're understood" is not how English works; there are rules of the language, and violating them will make people think you don't speak English well (even if they understand you perfectly). There's a difference between the kinds of differences you see across dialects and the kinds of errors you see children and non-native speakers make. What it doesn't have is the idea that you need a standard version because dialects are not quite the same (although they're generally mutually intelligible). That's not to say that there aren't dialects that you'd be more likely or less likely to expect another native speaker to understand; however, there are multiple such dialects, all of which are pretty much totally mutually intelligible with all the others, and this really doesn't present any sort of problem for native speakers in practice. There is, however, no consciously defined standard version; there was absolutely orthography standardization in the 18th-19th centuries, but political conditions resulted in multiple standards, and as a result no formal standard is all that authoritative.

If you try to create a lingua franca that's like English or a variant of English, you have to make it so people who can read/write English can read/write the lingua franca and vice versa, at least at a basic level of intelligibility (you don't have to be able to do so effortlessly, but it shouldn't take too much effort to understand not-too-complicated things written in the other one). Otherwise, there's not a whole lot of point in making it a variant of English: if everyone has to learn something new, it won't be easier to make it like what English speakers already know (and rely on them not absentmindedly mixing the two to too* great an extreme). You may as well just push Esparanto: if you're not making it compatible with a natural language, then why bother basing it off one?

The issue with changing pronunciation and grammar is that either they don't quite stick (if people learn a constructed language as a native language, they will have a different grammar than someone who learned it by reading the standards), or else you're teaching it to everyone as a second language. You aren't going to be able to have lots of people learn it natively until you have people who speak it as a second language, so you need to convince people that they should learn it as a second language. But no one body has the authority to change school curricula for more than a small proportion of the English-speaking world. For places that have native speakers the majority are in the US, where control is at the local level and most school systems would resist this kind of change. For places that don't have native speakers, you have to deal with the exact same issues that prevented constructed languages from becoming lingua francas -- people learn second languages to communicate, natural languages have pre-existing native speaker communities, constructed languages do not.

* no, I didn't plan this, but it is sort of funny in a post about English spelling and pronunciation