[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".