[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?

[dmitriid]

> 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.

It's more than just sounds. Turkish and Romanian alphabets capture the sounds of Turkish and Romanian alphabets quite well.

But then...

In Turkish "I will do something" is written like this: "Bir şey yapıcaǧım". And if you're going for proper enunciation, that's what you will say. In most situations most people will say "Bi şey yapıcam" (note the omission of "r" in "Bir" and "ǧı" in "yapıcaǧım").

Do the letters correspond to the sounds? Yes. Does it help? Nope, people will not speak the way it's written, because written rules describe a very specific rigid set of rules. And, for example, elisions and contractions [1] are very common in nearly every language and are often frowned upon in written texts (except for a small number of unavoidable ones).

And that's before we go into the plethora of sounds between dialects and regional variations. For example, in Swedish, there's a combination of letters, `sj`[3] that has at least four different pronunciations across Sweden. So, the word "seven", "sju" will be pronounced with [ɕ] in one part of Sweden, with [ɧ], in a different part of Sweden and so on. It's the same word, should it be spelled differently for each group of people?

And note, we're just touching just 1% of 1% of the complexities of pronunciation :) And they rarely if ever can be captured in written text and rules for the written text.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_(grammar)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Fricatives Wikipedia has a full paragraph dedicated to this alone

[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.

[dmitriid]

It's enough to talk about the UK. They have standardized the English language. And yet...

[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.