[saghm]

One of the things that blew my mind when I took a few semesters of Dutch in college is that the language occasionally gets amended (or more precisely, the way it's taught in schools is amended, although after a generation or two of delay the effects are the same) to fix inconsistencies. I can't remember if clarifying 'ij' and 'y' was one of those, but I remember the professor telling us about how a while back people were upset when they updated the spelling of the word "pannenkoek" (which I think had previously been spelled "pannekoek"), which some people apparently still haven't gotten over after almost three decades[1].

I wish there were enough willpower for something similar for English, but it's probably too late to reach any sort of compromise on whether to use a "u" in words like "color"/"colour".

[1]: https://dutchreview.com/news/dutch-government-argue-over-spe...

[prerok]

Well, I think the difference is that for Dutch, people are mostly colocated, i.e. share the same space and have a national curriculum to guide the use.

For English, it's quite different because many countries list it as their official language but may have diverged spellings and meanings and there is no single body to direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US vs. British English and the u in colo(u)r is a mere spelling example. Consider surgery or elevator, which are bigger discrepancies. I remember from my school days, as a non-native speaker, these were much more troublesome and we had a special test just to check we could tell which is which in US and GB English.

[dragonwriter]

> For English, it's quite different because many countries list it as their official language but may have diverged spellings and meanings and there is no single body to direct the curriculum. The most notable is the US

The US doesn't have an official language, though most institutions operate primarily in English, and all US states that have one or more official languages include English on that list.

[dhosek]

Nor does the US have an official curriculum. In the 80s, there was a wide variation both between and within states as to what a student with a high school diploma might have been expected to know. When the state of Illinois increased the graduation requirement for high school students from 1 to 2 years of mathematics, my high school added a second-year general math class because too many students couldn’t pass pre-algebra because fractions were beyond their ken. (The graduation requirement was subsequently amended such that no math below algebra could be counted for graduation and then later that students needed to have taken at least math up to the level of algebra and geometry because of districts stretching algebra I into a two-year sequence).

[bobthepanda]

Common Core was probably the closest to a consistent curricula but then got bogged down in politics.

[dhosek]

Most (maybe all now?) states have standard state-wide curricula. Some are painfully vague, some are painfully detailed. When I was looking at this when I got my credential, it seemed like many small-to-medium sized states copy-pasted their curricula from other states.

[Gormo]

> Nor does the US have an official curriculum.

The US (i.e. the federal government) has no legal authority over education at all -- schools are run at the state level, and individual states often do have standard curricula.

[mywittyname]

> these were much more troublesome and we had a special test just to check we could tell which is which in US and GB English.

I'm American and sometimes the only way I know that I'm using the GB spelling is when autocorrect flags it. Grey and defence are two just from the top of my head.

[daniel-s]

I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy.

English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works and who decides what the correct anything for the language is. The closest are style guides, but they come from multiple organisations and each often different to each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something will be spelt differently.

[tivert]

> I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy.

Well, they like to pretend they have that kind of authority, those languages don't actually have a "boss" in charge of how the language works either.

IIRC, the French Academy has tried (and failed) to stamp out anglicisms like email (https://www.thoughtco.com/le-courriel-vocabulary-1371793) and weekend (https://www.lawlessfrench.com/tag/franglais/).

[prerok]

Indeed, that was what I was trying to say, but you put it more accurately. Thanks!

[kmeisthax]

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

English had multiple attempted spelling reforms, but that mostly resulted in differences between American and British spellings of the same words. There was no central power to enforce a single English spelling because America had successfully broken off from the British Empire whose coercive force backed the English language.

In contrast, France was extremely good at putting down revolutionaries in their colonies. Even when they gained nominal independence France would invent debts to impoverish their former colonies. France was also extremely good at putting down local languages, even within France itself. France waged a century-long campaign to hunt its own minority languages to extinction[0] and the language regulators are themselves part of the same infrastructure.

In other words, "regular spelling" is a colonial atrocity and English's incomprehensible spelling rules are a demonstration of freedom.

This can even be demonstrated in each language's attitude towards loanwords. English stole huge swaths of Latin, Greek, and French vocabulary. Text even a few centuries old is difficult to read and anything older than Shakespeare is completely inscrutable[1] as there's too many Germanic root words for this ostensibly Germanic language. Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.

Well, I suppose there is one reason why you'd want to stop it: loanwords make it far harder to regularize spelling. Think about, say, all the Japanese loanwords in English. Hepburn romanization[2] tried to make them readable to English speakers, but didn't do a great job, so now English has to accommodate spellings like karaoke, tsundere, or sakura alongside spellings like pleonasm, beef, or Olympic. Good luck inventing a spelling system that can both faithfully represent the "correct" sounds for all of those words, while also remaining legible to present English readers, and being adopted in every country that speaks English to some degree - off the top of my head that includes America, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, and South Africa.

[0] Which I suspect may have also inspired analogous atrocities in Canada against indigenous Canadians

[1] As I put it to a native Japanese speaker: "You can read Genji, I can't read Beowolf."

[2] Which itself isn't used by native speakers since you can't round-trip Hepburn to Romaji. Japan itself uses Kunrei-shiki romanization, it's the one that spells つ as tu instead of tsu.

[seszett]

> Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.

That's something one hears quite often from English speakers but I don't really know where this myth comes from.

French is a quite decentralised language with each country having its own "regulator" but none of them have legal power. They are all just advisory organisations. Many the one with the most power is the OQLF in Québec. The French ministry of education decides what is taught in France and some of its reforms are sometimes followed by the other countries, but they don't deal with vocabulary itself, mostly orthography.

The Académie Française does invent words, but they have no official value or power. Their main occupation is documenting actual usage.

Most other European languages do have international, language wide regulators though, often with actual legal value, but French doesn't have anything like this.

I think it all comes down to English speakers knowing even less about the other languages than they know about French.

[YawningAngel]

I'm not sure I agree with your second footnote. Beowulf is written in Old English, which is quite hard for modern English speakers to read on account of being German. Middle English, however, I think you'd find fairly palatable. For example, the Peterborough Chronicle (https://adoneilson.com/eme/texts/peterborough_40.html) is _roughly_ contemporaneous with the Tale of Genji and is readable by modern English speakers.

[fivestones]

This looked as incomprehensible to me (a native English speaker) as a foreign language, albeit one with a bunch of scattered words I recognized…until I figured out that þ meant th and all the sudden I could mostly read it fine.

[gpvos]

The few Welsh and Gaelic speakers that remain entered the chat.

[retrac]

The French do something similar, as do the Germans. They've had relatively little luck with substantial changes recently, though. The 1990 French reforms were rather trivial. For example. the placement of the diaeresis was shifted to the first vowel in some digraphs. So "aiguë" (acute, sharp) is now "aigüe" since it is two syllables, but the former spelling misleadingly hints at three syllables. That one seems to have been well-accepted. Many of the other reforms have been only partially accepted, or explicitly rejected by many speakers. (I don't think I am ever going to get used to "ognon" for onion.)

[moi2388]

Yes, you are correct.

It’s updated in something called “The green book”, new versions got published in 1954 - 1995 - 2005 - 2015.

So for the people having learnt the language before 1995 (like myself), had the rules change 2.5 times (the last one was a minor actualisation). Which means that most of the intuitions you developed are wrong, and people spelling words differently depending on their age.

This was quite confusing for me as a kid haha

[bobthepanda]

The thing is that with all the regional Englishes and their pronunciations it would be basically impossible to settle on a consistent phonetic spelling.

[gpvos]

Dutch has an amazing variety of dialects. Strong dialect speakers from the southwest and northeast corners of the language area will not be able to understand each others dialects.

[bobthepanda]

there's only one prestige Dutch dialect though whereas English has multiple prestige regional dialects.

It would be like if Dutch and Afrikaans had to agree on spellings.

[seszett]

> there's only one prestige Dutch dialect though

Which one would that be? AN which nobody actually uses (at least here in Flanders)?

I don't know much about how it works within the Netherlands but within Belgium at least the Dutch accent gives you no prestige at all. I would expect the reverse to be true in the Netherlands (whichever accent one would choose to represent the Flemish) since the Dutch sometimes don't even recognise Flemish speakers as native Dutch speakers and answer in English instead.

Afrikaans is a related but separate language. Suriname, as the third Dutch speaking country, does use the same spellings as Belgium and the Netherlands.

[bobthepanda]

“Prestige” dialect is the term in linguistics for what is the favored standard taught in schools, used in business and media broadcasts, etc.

My understanding of Dutch is that Dutch media from Suriname to Belgium to NL uses the same prestige dialect. If you were to write a statement for a court, there is exactly one dialect that would be appropriate.

This is not true with English, where each major English speaking region teaches its own standard of English as the standard.

[gpvos]

The prestige dialect in Flanders, as spoken on the main news and public affairs programmes on public television (I don't know about the schools and courts), is already very recognizably different from that in the Netherlands, with its soft "g", slightly different vowels and somewhat different vocabulary. But it is losing terrain fast: the commercial TV channels, and entertainment programmes on public TV, are mostly using a hybrid between Flemish dialects and the (former?) prestige dialect that rather leans towards the Brabant dialect ("tussentaal"). Netherlands Dutch and Flemish Dutch, while still mutually understandable without much effort, have started to diverge more in the last decades. Although I haven't noticed people replying in English yet.

[Gormo]

> I wish there were enough willpower for something similar for English

English tends to develop through evolution, not design. Whose willpower would we be talking about anyway?