[heisenbergs]

The written English language is an odd one. It's technically not at all standardized, or if so by some private non-officially or only locally recognized institutions. Unlike other languages, say French and German, that are strictly maintained and rules set by an official institution that may even be cross-border (Germany-Austria). These haven't been shy to institute bigger changes just to make the written language more coherent.

Really this just shows how the British empire managed to spread it's word (literally) but not manage to manage it properly. We now have a litany of different English language versions, which is interesting from a cultural perspective but entirely contradicts what a language is made for: communicating.

We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language and untangling the current written mess. That way we'd make 10% of English speaker's lives much better...

[jackfoxy]

Nope. You have not convinced me a top down authority for the English language is necessary of even desirable. I call this approach the engineer's fallacy of seeing something messy and wanting to engineer it right away.

I do occasionally cringe at changes to English driven by the great influx of non-native speakers and lack of education of even the native speakers, my favorite being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

But hey, it's all good. This is how culture changes language. It's a living dynamic.

[cartoonfoxes]

Notably, subsets of English are already standardized in domains where this would be useful. For example, Aviation English and Simplified Technical English, maintained by the ICAO and ASD respectively. This approach whereby a language is only "standardized" for use in a specific domain makes sense to me.

[hnick]

I like to consider English in the same class is loosely typed dynamic programming languages... Perl, PHP, Javascript, etc. They get popular because the lack of strictness makes them easy to work with and they spread like... well, some would say a disease ;)

The lack of strictness in English means you can say something wrong but intelligible very easily, so we all get by.

[qsort]

This is also the default positions of most (almost all) linguists. You don't get to tell a dog what counts as barking.

[LudwigNagasena]

People aren’t dogs and they may desire a unified standard that simplifies communication.

By the way, it shouldn’t matter at all what a linguist thinks about that unless it is literally his field of expertise. And political sociolinguistics is not a field of expertise of most linguists.

[qsort]

> People aren’t dogs and they may desire a unified standard that simplifies communication.

Yeah but do they? It doesn't seem to me like a standard of this kind is anywhere near a priority for anybody. I'm not even a native speaker and I never felt the need of it. Why are we trying to fix something that's clearly not broken?

[SilasX]

This. Just because it's not expert group X's job to study Y, doesn't mean Y is unimportant or can be ignored.

[porknubbins]

Isn’t begging the question just a confusing mistranslation anyway? People without some serious training are not usually good at spotting logical fallacies much less categories of argument.

[hnick]

I always interpreted it as an elision. Something like "But that begs [me to ask] the question why XYZ".

[dan-robertson]

So in some sense that is what begging the question means because it’s what people usually mean when they say the phrase, and there is no central body to fix the meaning of English phrases and complain when they are wrong.

Traditionally, begging the question is the logical fallacy of assuming the consequent: proving that something is true conditionally on the fact that it is true and then deducing that it is true.

It is a mistranslation because it’s origin is a poor translation of assuming as begging and the consequent as the question.

On the other hand any direct translation (and initially translations were direct translations through several languages which is worse) of any early works of philosophy or logic (say Plato) will have this problem as the vocabulary Plato had to use just didn’t already have words for all the things in logic and philosophy that we now have words for.

[malcsm]

> We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language

How can we standardise English when we can't even agree on the spelling of the word 'standardise'.

But, seriously, one of the strengths of English is that it is a democratic language. It is usage which defines the language, not some official body.

[airstrike]

That's a pretty liberal interpretation of democratic, or a thinly veiled claim that other languages are perhaps "less democratic". If the official body represents the will of the people, then how is it not democratic?

Saying that English is a pretty anarchic language would probably be a more accurate statement, not that there's anything wrong with that fact.

[retrac]

> If the official body represents the will of the people

As anyone who speaks French can tell you, the official body's prescriptions often have no relationship to the will of the people regarding how they actually use the language.

There's quite something to the polysynthetic view where modern French has a verb system with extensive clitics, but such an analysis devoid of appropriate genuflection to Latin gives les grammairiens anciens fits.

[cyphar]

Not to mention that many variants of French (Canadian French, Swiss French, Belgian French, and so on) would -- to my understanding -- not be considered by Académie Française to be "proper French" even though they are objectively French (mutually intelligible) and yet have deviated despite the formation of the Académie Française in the 1600s and its continued existence since the 1800s.

I don't see how the situation would be different with English (especially given that French was not as international in the 1600s as English is today -- so that ship has long since sailed). Not to mention that English spelling reforms have been tried many times in the past and rarely caught on within a single country let alone worldwide[1].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...

[afiori]

French is well known* to be on the complete opposite spectrum in terms of speed of evolution or disposition to adopt new words/constructs.

Surely there is an happy middle ground.

* as most well known things without strong factual basis

[ivanhoe]

> or a thinly veiled claim that other languages are perhaps "less democratic"

They are exactly that, less democratic, as the language standard is dictated by a committee of academics/politicians, leading to it often diverging significantly from the spoken language. In the most extreme cases language ends up used for the political purposes - for instance in my home country once known as Yugoslavia, following the break out of the federal entities into the new independent countries, there was a big push for separating each dialect of more-or-less common language spoken on the most of the territory into declaratively separate languages in order to backup the whole new politics of separate national countries and to deepen the gap between the new countries. So now we have 4 languages that are in spoken version basically the same, but standard languages differ.

[coliveira]

This is exactly the opposite. English is spoken in different ways across the world, however its written version is dictated by the media of the main countries UK and USA. The way English is managed is as an archaic written language that doesn't take into consideration the way people speak it.

[fpig]

> So now we have 4 languages that are in spoken version basically the same, but standard languages differ.

It's actually the other way around, the standard languages are very similar, but spoken language differs greatly, even between different areas of one country, to the extent of not being mutually intelligible.

[AmericanChopper]

People already use the English language in a manner fitting their will. If you wanted to try and standardize it internationally, you’d either need most speakers to change to the standardized version (not going to happen), or you’d just end up publishing a canonical version for reference which everybody ignores (seems a bit pointless).

More importantly, why would you want to do this? It just seems like a compulsive reaction to the purity of standardization. If inter-dialect communication is the goal, why not establish a standard accent as well?

[ravi-delia]

The problem comes from the body not representing the will of the people. Obviously if some tyrannical standards board made malicious standards no one would actually feel any need to obey, but then of course that's the inherent problem of language standards boards. Either the board simply describes what's already said, or it doesn't, and either way it's useless.

[wolco2]

A system to introduce new words in English exists and it is not anarchic. It's a democratic or popularity contest where if a word is used enough it becomes part of the language and accepted. Dictionaries have standards where a word must appear in print a number of times to be accepted.

Other languages are less dynamic so they are less responsive to introducing new words. Some of those and others controlled by official bodies which may or may not represent the population are less popularity driven. In those cases a guardian relationship exists where words are vetting by others. English is vetted by all.

[coliveira]

That's not true at all, this process doesn't happen just in the English language. Most languages evolve the same way, new words are introduced to the lexicon through the spoken language, newspapers and books, and later added to dictionaries. For example, in German the Duden is printed every five years with new recent words added. The same in happens in other countries where academics create new vocabularies based on current usage.

[coliveira]

That's a straw man. In other languages the rules are also defined by usage. Nobody institutes changes in a language just for the sake of adding new features, like we do in software. The difference is that countries speaking the language agreed on setting common rules, with the goal of making official what is already becoming standard by daily use. Without such an agreement, there will always be some small area that wants to stick to old rules, making communication harder for everyone.

[canjobear]

Au contraire, the French academy loves to change the language for purely subjective/aesthetic reasons in ways that strongly differ from common usage.

[mfcl]

It can happen, but it's pretty rare. And when it happens nothing changes because no one cares.

[ordu]

It works in a funny way sometimes. The last attempted reform in Russian tried to change spelling of several words to better reflect pronunciation. It failed spectacularly because of public outrage: new spelling rules make people to write in a bad spelling. People have been learning for generations that "парашют" must be spelled with 'ю' (not 'у'), the other way they perceived as mistaken, so they perceived new grammar as mistaken, and no logic arguments could change that.

The previous couple of reforms I believe were successful because of communists' ruling style. The first one was dramatic, it removed several letter from alphabet and did a bunch of other changes. People who run away from communists in 1917..24 continued to use old grammar for decades.

> The difference is that countries speaking the language agreed on setting common rules, with the goal of making official what is already becoming standard by daily use.

There is a trouble with that. The standard by daily use is to follow official spelling. Pronunciation could shift sometimes, but spelling is fixed. Any changes in spelling (even official ones) feel as blasphemy. Some people could overcome this feeling, but the most could not and want not.

[BurningFrog]

So what kind of rules do these allegedly successfully language regulating countries enforce?

[ricw]

for one, they would agree on one version of how to write standardize. It's primarily about spelling, and sentence cases, constructs etc. It typically adapts to the language, not the other way around.

[BurningFrog]

Ok. To me, spelling is more of a storage format for language. Not really the language itself.

That makes trying to regulate it more reasonable.

[LatteLazy]

You could easily keep the democratic nature of English use but standardise (and more importantly rationalise) the spelling.

[grawprog]

Standardize to what though? Personally I like spelling colour, humour etc. with a 'u', pronouncing 'z' like zed. Which standard do we use? I mean, British, American and Canadian English, to use three big ones, all use different spellings and pronounciations for different words. I personally, would not be happy having to standardize to either American or British English and I doubt Americans or British would be happy standardizing to the others.

And that's not even getting into all the other English variations out there.

[LatteLazy]

I think the idea here isn't that we all need to use/not-use "u" in colour or z in - ize. That makes no actual difference to someone trying to spell a word they can say or say a work they're reading.

The point here is that for many words in English, there is no actual link between the letters in the spelling and the sounds in the spoken word.

I've been learning German for a few years. The spelling is easy. I spell 90% of words right first try. If I hear a word I can spell it well enough to look it up in a dictionary and learn what it means.

The opposite is true in English. Does a word have "ie" or "ei" in it? There is no way to know. Does a work starting with an "n" have a silent "k" in front (or worse, words like honest that start with an "o" sound but are spelt with an h)? No way to know. Does a word end -ite or - ight? No way to know.

There are a lot of surprise complexities that serve a purpose (when you have 2+ words with the same pronunciation but different spellings) or that are just sytlistic (colour vs color). I don't object to that.

But we should stop pretending you can spell out words or that written and spoken words are linked, at least 25% of the time they're not. Just look at that last sentence: there is no W in written and no L in should. No wonder kids struggle with this crap.

[Izkata]

> The opposite is true in English. Does a word have "ie" or "ei" in it? There is no way to know.

They may be complicated, but rules exist, and I find it interesting this was the first example you jumped to - there's a rhyme we're taught as kids that works the majority of the time: "'i' before 'e' except after 'c', or when sounded like 'a' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh'".

[LatteLazy]

I think this is a really good example actually.

When I was at school (I turned 8 in 2002, I'm a brit in case it matters :) ) it was just "'i' before 'e' except after 'c'".

Thats actually already bad, why swap 2 letters around based on a third if the word sounds the same anyway?

Then we had to add two more caveats to the rule.

And English spelling still doesn't fit this rule, even with the extra bits bolted on. At best it's a guideline (Frequencies or any other pluralised -cy word seems to break it)

Before we learnt 1000 different spellings. Now we learn a rule, but it's quite complex, and then we learn 200 exceptions to this rule.

But for what?

From now on, it's always "ie". Done. Wouldn't that be simpler? We could eliminate the I all together. There is no "I" sound in neighbour or weigh. They should be neybor and way (or if you really need to distinguish all the other Way words, "wey").

Then instead of 1000 hours of frustration, little kids can all spell correctly on day one and get on and do 1000 hours of maths or reading or art or something.

[jimsmart]

It's the fact that these so-called rules have exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions.

Weird. Foreign. Neither. Keith. None of those are sounded as an 'a'.

That's why we can't realistically generalise and say these rules are actual rules - they're more rule of thumb. If you're lucky.

[jimktrains2]

But if you've never seen "weigh" written, how would you spell it. That's the issue, not that we need to memorize baroque hints for words whose spelling we can't fully remember because it's essentially impossible to generate the spelling from first principles.

Then there are words like "stein", that just feel like the rules are too good for them.

[jimktrains2]

I've been helping my 4yo learn to read, and...it's brutal trying to explain some stuff. E at the end of the word making the vowel long and is silent? Then you see "have" and "One"? No clue but to just give him the pronunciation. Do any words other than "you" have our making this sound? "Through" but what happens to that gh? "The" and "them" require the th to be spoken differently. Where does the v come from in "of"? Why is the e long in "me"?

In english it's simply not possible to, in general, pronounce a word correctly that you've never heard said or spell a word you've never seen written. This is true even if you limit yourself to only germanic words

[LatteLazy]

The issue with English (I think) is that its a mostly germanic spoken language, with Latin (French) spelling imposed over it. Plus there are an enormous number of foreign words added sometimes with their original spelling, sometimes with a hacked phonetic version.

I assumed all languages were like this (spelling only loosely/occasionally linked to pronunciation). But German manages it just fine.

I always found it frustrating being told to sound out words and everyone acting like this system worked when I was a kid. It put me off reading/writing etc. Not sure what I can suggest other than being honest and saying "yeah, you're right, that word makes no sense".

[lalaithion]

The problem is that English-as-spoken is diverse enough to become unintelligible between some speakers (https://youtu.be/UGRcJQ9tMbY), from pronunciation to grammar to vocabulary. Any attempt to standardize English will inevitably result in the fracturing of English into multiple languages.

[socialdemocrat]

Let me guess, you don't speak anything but English? The thing is that English isn't actually that diverse. Certainly not considering how widely it is used and by how many people.

There is more variety in how my native Norwegian is spoken, and that is only spoken by 5 million people.

You also don't seem to distinguish between dialects, written forms and a language. E.g. Norwegian is a language with dozens of dialects and four written form, two of which are official. The various dialects map to one written form more closely than another.

Nothing stops English from being a language of different dialects and different written forms. The point isn't how many written forms there are but that those that exist are standardized. That is IMHO not a very hard thing. E.g. the largest area where English is natively spoken is the US. And the US has almost no variation in how the language is spoken.

Yes I know American loudly object to this but I have traveled all over the US and lived several placed. Honestly there is not much difference between how somebody in Grand Forks, North Dakota speaks and somebody in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Yes, by American standards it may sound very different. But by say Swiss standards, Norwegian standards etc not very much. Even tiny Britain has more regional variation.

One would simply create American, British, Australian etc standardized written forms, while trying to harmonize each written form as well as possible.

[jhanschoo]

> Let me guess, you don't speak anything but English? The thing is that English isn't actually that diverse. Certainly not considering how widely it is used and by how many people.

I agree with your point in general that English as is spoken in international media isn't all that diverse, but if you look at the British Isles where the language has traditionally evolved for centuries you'll find a picture that more closely resembles other long-lived non-international (? national?) languages with rich dialectical variation.

[Swizec]

Oh you think that’s rough?

Non-english languages are way better at this. In Slovenia, for example, we have about 2 million speakers. Those are divided into 32 dialects. Many of them mutually unintelligible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects

Germany has a similar problem with regional dialects.

That’s why these languages have a standard official version. Because they need one.

The fact English doesn’t have such a standard is fantastic evidence to the relative lack of strong dialects.

Then again, we do have BBC English and American Movie English which act as de facto standards.

Oh and air traffic control english is also heavily standardized from what I’ve heard. Defined with the rigor of an API.

[zorked]

Basically any language has that many dialects - or many more. English has a ton of unintelligible dialects but you won't hear them on CNN/Hollywood and speakers of those dialects will adjust to a more standardized form of the language to talk to outsiders. Remember that the Caribbean, Africa, etc. all speak English and it's not American/British that they speak. Even traveling in (super-small and birthplace of the language) Great Britain will expose you to a lot of dialects even if locals will swap to a regularized language to talk to you...

[Swizec]

Yep. My point isn’t that Slovenian, German et al are special in having many dialects. Slovenian has way many for such a small language, but all languages have them.

What’s interesting about English is the relative lack of dialects outside the UK. It’s already a very standardized lingua franca because of how it spread.

And what’s left is solvable with the BBC/Hollywood English. Similar to how germany has hoch deutsch – an invented standard dialect everyone learns in school.

You can have a standard form of English taught in schools without demanding say-to-day stabdardization in common use. And we kinda already do. Just unofficially.

[com]

Airspeak and her sister Seaspeak. Fabulous reduced grammars and controlled vocabularies.

[angrygoat]

That's a funny sketch, but there is literally a standardised minimal set of English just to deal with this potential problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English

[YawningAngel]

I don't think this is a problem in the real world. It might be hard for second-language speakers, but that's probably true for all languages.

[guenthert]

That was quite funny, thanks. Welsh however is very much a different language, not a dialect of english.

Iechyd da i chwi yn awr ac yn oesoedd!

[kenniskrag]

> Unlike other languages, say French and German, that are strictly maintained and rules set by an official institution that may even be cross-border (Germany-Austria).

For german there aren't any standards maintained by an institution. Duden [1] is an institution, which tries but they aren't official imho. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden

[BrandiATMuhkuh]

If you asked a linguistics (not a writer) s/he will tell you the following: Language is simply a reflection of the people who speak it. In other words, the more diverse the population of this language is, the more diverse the language will be.

This is also why the German language was so cohesive, but is getting more and more diverse. Because, the German speaking population is now more diverse.

[socialdemocrat]

That linguistic is then an idiot, and you should not listen to that person, because they clearly have no clue what they are talking about. If this claim was true, the conclusion would be that all of the US is a less diverse place than my native Norway. Why? Because the Norwegian language is far more diverse in how people speak it than American English.

And your assessment of German, displays a lack of historical knowledge of how language develops and get standardized. Most European languages tended to be far more diverse in the past. Contrary to your claim all European languages have become ever more homogenous in modern times.

Why you ask? Because language tends to develop into different forms in isolation. Hence all of Europe has historically been a patchwork of languages. The formation of nation states through the 1800s and standardized schooling is what caused the gradual homogenization of language.

It is the late founding of the US, which the the reason why American English is so homogenous despite the size of the country and its diversity.

French, German, Norwegian, Dutch and plenty of other European languages was in fact so diverse that a national standardization was needed in large part to actually be able to write books which could be used throughout.

In fact in my native Norway creating a written form of Norwegian proved so difficult we ended up with something like four different written forms all with different spelling and grammatical rules. Two of these written forms are official and taught all over Norway. Neither written form really corresponds exactly to how anybody speaks as Norwegians speak a multitude of dialects with different pronouns, grammar and words which loosely map to either of the written forms.

But at least by having a language board we have somebody trying to make sure the spelling isn't the utter mess that English is. English grammar is easier than Norwegian grammar, but the spelling is the worst of any language I have learned.

[presentation]

Lol yeah for real. I live in Japan, and when I visit off the beaten road places, it's pretty common to find old people whose dialects even my native Japanese wife can't understand. And in China, you can take a 1 hour train ride and end up in a place where the local dialect is mutually unintelligible from where you came from - just the Chinese government forced everyone to standardize on Mandarin. Both of these places are known for being dramatically less diverse than the English world, and yet here we are.

[bgorman]

I don't think German is the poster child for cohesion. Swiss German, Bavarian German, Swabian German, Low German and High German sound completely different and use different vocabulary.

The differences are much greater than the differences between Spanish or English dialects for example.

[hilbert42]

'We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language and untangling the current written mess.'

Nice idea methinks but I reckon there's not a snowball's chance. For starters, Anglophone countries would have to agree upon some structure or institution to act as a regulator à la the Académie Française, (the Moderator of the French Language): https://www.thoughtco.com/academie-francaise-1364522. Given past and present politics, it seems to me they'd first delare war on each other before ever agreeing to that!

[socialdemocrat]

Seriously this isn't a problem. My native Norwegian exists in 4 different written forms. Two of the forms are official. A language can have multiple written forms. Both of these forms are maintained by the Norwegian language board.

You simple create a British, American, Canadian, Australian etc language board. Then these boards can choose to coordinate and cooperate. There is no problem having multiple written forms. The point is two have these written forms standardized and maintained.

E.g. Norwegian regularly imports new words from other languages. Usually the board will create Norwegian variants of these following Norwegian phonetical rules. These become one of several valid variant of a word. E.g. we imported the word "genre" from French. The board made a Norwegian spelling for it "sjanger." Both versions where valid until gradually "sjanger" replaced "genre."

The Dutch and the Flemish have different language boards but the cooperate so Dutch and Flemish is to my knowledge almost identical in spelling.

[hilbert42]

I truly hope my cynicism is unwarranted, that I'm wrong, and that your ideas are viable and would work because English is in an almighty mess (and I feel sorry for those who have to learn it as a second language). However, I think you overestimate the ability for any agreement within any Anglophone country let alone even a partial agreement across any or all of them.

You come from a part of the world that is renowned for its sense and civility, whereas over the last 40 or so years the Anglophone countries have had internal squabbles over just about everything and anything to the extent that they have—in parts—become almost dysfunctional, democracy just isn't working to the extent that it once did. I say this as someone who was born in one, worked in three of them, and travelled to the others at various times over the years.

Take the US for instance: the country has become so polarised over whether to wear facemasks in the COVID-19 epidemic—even after getting the best advice available to wear them—that one could be forgiven for thinking that insanity pills have been added to its water supplies. It's likely the very notion that someone or authority might make suggestions about changing the way people write or speak—even if it's not aimed directly at specific individuals—would likely be taken as an affront by many.

Again, I'd love to be proved wrong as I've been saying for years that both pronunciation and spelling would be much easier if English were to introduce characters with accents/diacriticals into those awkward, pesky words such as 'through', 'thorough', 'thought' and so on.

In fact, I posted a rather long response on the neurosciencenews.com website asking if anyone knew of any research work that's been carried out with bad spellers and those with demonstrated dyslexia with the aim of helping them to overcome their reading difficulties 'by training them with accented text (albeit suitably contrived for the purpose)'. I went on to suggest 'that if it's not so then this might be an avenue worthy of research'. It seems to me, that if any progress is to be made in cleaning up English then the lever could well come from a successful—or even partially successful—way of treating dyslexia (as the research would have demonstrated that the changes to the language were worthwhile and should be made).

Your point about multiple implementations is worthy of note. If say changes were made to books specifically printed for dyslexic people then, over time, some or all of the changes could be more widely adopted.

My post hasn't appeared on neurosciencenews.com yet, presumably as it's a moderated site. I'll look at the post again and see if parts of it are suitable for posting here, if so then I'll post them directly below in reply to this post.

[hilbert42]

As mentioned above, here is most of my post to the neurosciencenews.com website in response to this HN article:

"From my experience, English is a dog of a language, its grammar is hither and thither, its spelling and punctuation are all over the place, and I really feel sorry for a non-native speaker who has to learn it.

I've never been a good speller nor a particularly good reader so reading a passage aloud in public is not something I particularly relish. On the other hand, my partner is not only an excellent reader and speller but also she can do cryptic crosswords with great ease—which is a task that's always eluded me. (It's always seemed pointless to me to deliberately increase the entropy of what one is saying by choosing cryptic words and meanings. One could just use clear text to avoid confusion.)

I put my lack of ability down to both my marginal aptitude for languages and not having much interest in learning them when I was at school. (Whilst it's possible I'm on the edge of being dyslexic I don't consider my reading handicap sufficiently large to bother me.)

My spelling was always worse than my grammar and the ways we were taught at school didn't help. For instance, spelling tests were marked out of 50 instead of 100 with two marks taken off for every spelling mistake. I cannot remember the total number of words in the test but it was well in excess of 50 and that meant one could score negative marks for spelling, which I did on occasions (but I wasn't the only one, there were also quite a few others). It seems to me that giving negative marks wasn’t the most productive way to engage students' interest.

There's no doubt that words such as 'pint', 'lint', 'through', 'though', 'thorough', etc. are a major problem for bad spellers but it's the sheer number of them that's the problem, add the large number of 'strange' English proper names to this and we're in big trouble. Whilst the correct punctuation of words like 'Wycombe' and 'Warwick' are comparatively well known to native speakers there are many others of that kind which aren't—and I reckon those two words would be very problematic for those learning English as a second language.

That long intro leads to my main point, which is to ask a question I've asked many times before without ever having received an even partially satisfactory answer. That being why doesn’t English use accents/diacriticals marks to help resolve many of its peculiar spellings and wayward pronunciations. It seems to me that if ever a language needs diacriticals then it has to be English. The problem of how to pronounce 'pint' and 'lint' correctly would be solved instantly if a diacritical were to be applied to one 'i' and not the other (for instance 'ì' 'í' or 'î' could be used).

From my experience, if you ask those who are knowledgeable in English and competent in using it (such as English teachers or those who run grammar or spelling websites) about potential usefulness of using diacriticals in English then their responses are nearly always negative or at best nonchalant. As they have already mastered English without the need to resort to them, they never see any need to ponder the matter further—and those who would have actually benefited from their use have never had sufficient knowledge or wherewithal to push for their introduction, hence the complicated mess that we have today.

Moreover, both native speakers and those with English as a second language face significant problems when they first come across written words that are not common in everyday usage. For example, I recall that I first came across the words 'chiral' and 'enantiomer' in textbooks well before I heard them being used by professionals who knew how to pronounce them correctly, again diacriticals would have quickly solved the problem. One may well ask why not consult a dictionary and use the IPA references. Correct, one can do that but if one is bad at pronunciation and spelling then one finds so many such words it becomes a never-ending tedium, thus one just skips over them none the wiser.

It seems to me that people with dyslexia and or those who are having difficulty with pronunciation and spelling would be much better served if English used diacriticals; I base this on my own experience from having learned other languages. I studied French at school and like English, I was never particularly good at it, similarly, for some years I lived in Austria, so I've a smattering of German. What's relevant here is that when I was learning French it was drummed into me that it was essential to understand the differences in pronunciation of 'e', 'é', 'è' and 'ê', etc. Thus, I've not much difficulty in pronouncing words like 'd'être' or proper nouns such as 'Tahère' and 'Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre'—a name certain cognoscenti will no doubt recognise (sorry the circumflex is missing, so three will have to suffice; right, I don't know any names that use all four pronunciations of 'e'). ;-)

What I am saying is that I could mount a reasonable argument to say that my pronunciation of certain French words that contain characters with diacriticals is better than it is of many English words whose characters are missing them! <...>"

[ravi-delia]

What do you imagine a standards board for English doing? Publishing an official standard and then everyone rejoices that finally someone has told them how to write the language they already write in? How is it any different from the myriad of 'rules' made up by well-intentioned people through history, many of which are now responsible for English's lack of well defined spelling rules?

In the end such a body would wind up either as descriptive, which is interesting academically but also useless from a standardization perspective, or prescriptive, which would just lead to it being happily ignored.

[stakkur]

Language is always evolving in some fashion--no language is truly 'static'. This varies by language and culture. One way to observe this is to see the development of dictionaries over time.

[afiori]

This is dependent on what you consider to be the purpose of a dictionary, to me there are two slightly different options:

1) A dictionary is a representation of agreed upon words and their meaning (as in scrabble).

2) A dictionary is a list of how you are likely to encounter a word being used. (as in urban dictionary)

with the latter a dictionary is a tool to help you better understand word/uses that can be unclear, with the former a dictionary provides justification for your choices of wording (the dictionary defines this word so and so, therefore my usage was correct).

In my opinion dictionaries are trying to be 2) but people use them as 1). It is how we get definition of "Literally: not literally, figuratively"; "literally" does not mean "not literally" it is simply used very often like that for emphasis.

[jandrese]

It's probably too late to start now. Those dialects are now considered part of the culture and if you tried to standardize them out you'll be accused of cultural whitewashing.

[qppo]

.. maybe because you would be whitewashing the language,

[dqv]

Do you know how they resolve weird grammatical constructions that are now a part of regional dialects?

One that comes to mind is "How it works?" Although it sounds weird, it is now common enough that there is no way to retroactively correct all the times it has come up.

The other one I see a lot is starting a sentence without an article e.g. "Asking, 'How it works?' is now considered grammatically correct. Reason being [,|that] it is frequently used in spoken English."

[dahfizz]

"How it looks like" is a similar incorrect and often used phrase that bugs me. Someone just mashed up "How it looks" and "What it looks like" and it stuck.

[a1369209993]

> One that comes to mind is "How it works?".

I've never heard that phrase before, so I guess it does qualify as wierd, but it's clearly following the same grammatical construction as [looks at hamburger] "Hamburger?", ie asking "X?" as a offer or request for X.

[dqv]

It's usually a heading in a description of how something works.

It is more natural to say either "How it works" (with no question mark) or "How does it work?"

[Dylan16807]

Ah, as a heading, now it makes sense. It doesn't work as an actual question to a person, but as part of that context the question mark is acting more like a colon.

[ajmurmann]

From my experience in Germany: You can still write however you want. The rules mainly matter if you are in school or in publishing or similar. Thus language can still evolve and the standardization body will eventually catch up.

In some ways auto correct is a stronger enforcer.

[cgriswald]

> In some way auto correct is a stronger enforcer.

I’m looking forward to the day when duck is considered a swear word.

[MagnumPIG]

This is not entirely correct for French. Though there is an Académie Française in France, it doesn't directly dictate rules to other French-speaking nations and cultures.

This is because France doesn't contain the majority of French speakers in the world, and even if it did there doesn't seem to be an incentive to follow any rules they may publish.

Source: I live in Québec, we don't defer to the Académie.

[hilbert42]

Right, I know, whenever I've been in Québec I've found my poor French to be even worse!

Escaping to Ontario is my usual relief.

;-)

[drieddust]

Funny story when I was in the UK two people born and brought up in the country came to my desk talking about a third person. I honestly thought they were speaking about two different people. While I was totally confused they seems to perfectly at peace pronouncing same name so differently. It was a classic Shawn vs Sean moment[1]. This feels weird personally because in my mother language Hindi this is nearly impossible. Each alphabet have a distinct sound. You just pronounce a word in 2 different manners.

[1] https://youtu.be/69UlVQpYwUE?t=85

[kwhitefoot]

Sean is not originally English but Irish. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean

And it has different pronunciations depending on the region.

[moron4hire]

While it is true that English is mutable across time and non-standardized across cultures, for an individual learning English as their first language, they are learning a snapshot of it that is--from their perspective--immutable and standardized.

The article's argument is the lack of consistency, not standardization. Unless you are arguing that children--in whom dyslexia first manifests--are being exposed to the vast diversity of English across time and space, then there can be no doubt that mutability and lack of unified culture contributes nothing to dyslexia.

[wheels]

I'd argue that you tend to see that happen in countries where the largest / most powerful speaker of that language is also the source of the language, such as French and German, and not in countries where the largest (in population) / most powerful (in size of economy) is not the originator, such as English (USA), Spanish (Mexico) or Portuguese (Brazil).

[101008]

La Real Academia Española rules the Spanish for Spain and Latin America.

[ajot]

More or less, there are many country-based language academies for Spanish, the first not-from-Spain being the colombian one. RAE now is part of a panhispanic community of Spanish language academies. That's why, for example, there is a "Diccionario panhispánico de dudas". You can read a little more about this at: https://www.rae.es/la-institucion/politica-panhispanica

[101008]

Yes, but that dictionary is from the RAE itself, so it is ruled by them.

[OriginalPenguin]

Other languages that are spoken in multiple countries might be technically standardized, like the RAE does with Spanish.

But that doesn't mean people outside of Spain follow the standard. (And depending on class and what part of Spain you live in, there's a good chance you don't follow the standard either, I'd imagine.)

[afiori]

people not following the standard does not remove value from a standard.

For centuries people wrote in Latin in Europe not because it was anyone natural language, but because of the reach it would grant[1].

[1] and because in many cases local languages were less sophisticated and inadequate to philosophy/poetry.

[zorked]

Your point [1] on the capabilities of some languages is generally discredited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[afiori]

If I understand the topic then linguistic relativity has nothing to do with this, consider the fictional language of cave-speak as a stripped down version of English, It is reasonable to imagine that it would be harder to discuss theology or write the principia mathematica in such a language.

[mmmBacon]

I love that English is messy. The messiness is what gives richness and new words and allows for richness and diversity of expression. There are some people who are truly masterful with their choices of words and word ordering.

If English had a central authority, I’d imagine that we’d have missed out on numerous great works.

[MeinBlutIstBlau]

I think that's what makes it so special. If a particular culture has a way of saying something, they aren't confined to rigid rules. They can take the base concepts and modify them in a way that suits them while also maintaining a common vernacular with the "motherland."

[monkpit]

> they aren’t confined to rigid rules

Ok, but let’s just assume for a second that there was some standard.

Your statement would still be true.

Nobody is “confined to rigid rules” unless we also make the Grammar Police a real thing.

[biztos]

I'm surprised I didn't see more native German speakers refute this.

First, German is not standardized, and the attempts to (re-)standardize it are, let's say, controversial.[0]

Even within Germany there are vast differences within the spoken language, mostly but not exclusively by region. The written language is more uniform but that's also a bit contested. I'm not a linguist but I'd guess the differences are at least as strong as in different parts of the UK.

For example in Berlin you would have the advantage that a native speaker of any form of German can pretty much understand the natives when they talk amongst themselves. You would not have that luxury in Swabia.

Second, the idea that this presumed standard crosses borders is... well sorry but it's absurd. Ask any Austrian or Swiss-German. Or even read their newspapers.

And finally, English is rapidly creeping into unofficial-but-official German. For example they routinely say "Vaccine" in the news instead of "Impfstoff" now. I could go on but I guess it's off topic.

German is a living language, and an international one, and as much as Duden might have been a guiding light to my generation it's not that for the kids at all.

[0]: (in German) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr...

[danans]

> That way we'd make 10% of English speaker's lives much better...

Which 10% is that?

[vonwoodson]

Boo that man!! Booo!!! Boo!!!

[Spinnaker_]

How does English compare to other languages in terms of adaptability and expression of new ideas and concepts? My intuition is that it would score much higher in these regards. I don't know if this is correct. One example would be that many newer words in English don't ever get translations in other languages, they just use the English word.

[coliveira]

Quite the opposite, English is a relatively poor language that lacks many refined elements found in many other languages such as specific gender and verbal inflection. A language like German is able to create very specific words by a well defined process, a process that is missing in English. So, while it is possible to express a lot of different meanings in English, the language is not very sophisticated at this compared to others. The big advantage enjoyed by English is the fact that it has been spread by the two imperial world powers of the last 200 years.

[jimktrains2]

Why do you consider gender inflections to be refined? Genderized things are essentially arbitrary and just something else that needs to be memorized. Even for people it gets tedious at times, hence why english has has the singular they for quite a while for referring to positions or unspecified people.

[wolfgke]

> Genderized things are [...] just something else that needs to be memorized

The same holds for the vocable - here, "nobody" complains that this is just something else that needs to be memorized. So, just consider the genus as part of the vocabulary word.

[airstrike]

> One example would be that many newer words in English don't ever get translations in other languages, they just use the English word.

I'd wager this is due to the outsized influence of American and British culture in other nations, the sheer number of people who speak English as a second or third language, and the relative ease with which certain English words can be borrowed into languages with entirely different phonemes relative to the other way around.

[dmitriid]

> We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language

"Standardising a language" never works. Prescriptivism rarely does because languages are living things and evolve no matter how many rules you throw at them.

> untangling the current written mess

Reforming the written language, however, is quite a possibility, and is often a good thing, because it actually follows a language's evolution rather than pretending that rigid rules reflect reality.

[vidarh]

Saying it "never works" is taking it too far. It depends what your goals are. Norwegian is "standardised". There are official versions of the two variants that are used. The prescription has significantly affected the evolution of both variants over decades of gradual language reforms used to bring them closer together.

E.g. we used to count closer to Danish in one of the Norwegian variants - 27 used to be "syv og tyve" ("seven and twenty"), while it is now "tjuesju", both altering the order and the words for twenty and seven. The Danish form was abolished in 1951. You'll still hear people - especially older - use the Danish form now and again, but it has become relatively rare outside of small geographic areas.

It does however not work if you're not prepared to deal with real-world use. E.g. "syv" was reintroduced as a valid (but deprecated) word for "seven", because its use has remained more persistent and proved harder to eradicate.

Norwegian language reforms have mostly been quite pragmatic in that respect - there's a general direction of travel, but the reforms sometimes undoes changes that proves not to "take". But control over what is taught as "correct" in schools has proven to work quite well as a means of making these changes happen, as long as you're patient and accept that certain types of changes are a lot easier to make happen than others.

It also of course matters that the changes makes sense to the users of the language. In the case of the "Danish counting" a lot of Norwegian dialects already used the "new" form, so it was a simplification, not a new invention - getting people to buy into something entirely new is generally harder.

[dmitriid]

It sounds like Norwegian reforms didn't as much as introduce change, but properly reacted to actual changes in the language. Which IMO is the best way to do those reforms and changes.

[vidarh]

Both yes and no, they introduce actual change for large parts of the population, but the introduce changes that reconcile differences in dialects or reconcile inconsistencies. Importantly they back off when a change doesn't get traction, and are prepared to wait and try again later rather than try to force through drastic changes too quickly.

[dmitriid]

I really like this approach. I can't imagine a better way to approach things in a language.

[ginko]

>"Standardising a language" never works.

Apart from the many instances where it worked I guess. English is really the odd one out here for not having a standard body.

[dmitriid]

> Apart from the many instances where it worked I guess.

It never really worked in those instances. What you see in the books and what you hear in real life are often two quite different things.

Even things like grammar rarely survive real life.

[yokaze]

Then you have a different understanding on what "works" means.

In many languages, standardisation means that the language actually survives because without it loses its utility and will replaced by a dominant language.

Not an expert in that matter, I only try to replicate what I've heard.

Basque did standardise quite late. To my understanding, people had difficulty to understand one another when they came from another valley. That limited the utility and Castilian (aka Spanish) was often used which put pressure on the language. And what words do you learn then at school? And what do teachers learn? And what is used at the university? And all the media, in which form will it be?

Romansh didn't standardise (or better said the standardisation didn't took hold) and faces that difficulty.

I bet you'll find a similar story in Irish Gaelic.

[dmitriid]

Yes, for smaller languages standardisation kinda sorta works. And yet you'll undoubtedly find that in reality the actual Basque and Irish Gaelic that are used differ from the prescribed standard.

[drieddust]

> It never really worked in those instances. What you see in the books and what you hear in real life are often two quite different things.

You are basing your assumption on languages using Roman writing system which actually isn't capable of expressing all sounds used within the language. All language systems doesn't suffer this. For example most Indian languages have accurate sound to letter mapping even to the level of defining short and long sounds of same alphabet differently. In order to speak correctly you just have to say the individual sounds together. There is no weirdness involved.

[dmitriid]

> You are basing your assumption on languages using Roman writing system which actually isn't capable of expressing all sounds used within the language.

Romanian and Turkish disagree. And the spoken language still differs (probably less so in Romanian, more so in Turkish).

[drieddust]

In my experience letters A-Z doesn't capture the whole gamut of utterances used in the language. Most languages use more sounds than 26 letters can capture. I don't know about Turkish or Romanian so can't say. As an example my mother tongue Hindi and Sanskrit maps the most of utterances of hard, soft, and nasal varieties originating from throat, palate, cerebral, dental, and lips into specific symbols. This reduces the friction between writing and speaking.

One can still speak wrong if they learn to speak the letters wrong but chances are reduced. Are Romanian and Turkish similar?

[LudwigNagasena]

It worked in literally every country. Every German knows standardized German, every Italian knows standardized Italian, every Chinese knows standardized Mandarin, every Malaysian knows standardized Malay, etc.

[dmitriid]

Every British person is taught Received Pronunciation etc.

And yet, you still have dialects, you still have people using words and grammar in slightly and not so slightly different ways from the prescribed standard.

Funny how it "literally works".

[LudwigNagasena]

If everyone speaks and understands RP then there is no problem. But it is not true, especially when we talk about all anglophone countries.

[ginko]

But that's spoken language. We're talking about written language standardization here.

edit: And arguably even spoken language eventually gets standardized through the written word. There's tons of regional German dialects without High-German, a more or less randomly chosen dialect, people from different regions would have a hard time even talking to each other.

[dmitriid]

Let me quote directly from my original answer:

> Reforming the written language, however, is quite a possibility, and is often a good thing, because it actually follows a language's evolution rather than pretending that rigid rules reflect reality.