AHC: English with a regulatory body

If you think that French is a language stuck in time, then ohh boy, you don't want to see what's happening in the Baltics.

Well, if compared to the other Romance languages French is hell.

If the reforms for English I suggested had been introduced in the 19th century, they wouldn't seem wrong to you. They'd seem normal.

That's a good point. Illiteracy isn't a problem anymore and today people have easy access to written information any time they want, there surely wasn't the case of most of the people in the recent past. Reforms happen for a reason. During the late 19th century, most Romance languages (French being the notable exception) dropped all useless fancy spelling rules adapted from the classical languages that were artificially introduced in the written language during the Early Modern era and never reflected into the spoken language, such as ph, double t, double f, silent p, etc. In Spanish or Portuguese the word "telégrapho" just looks like and artificial old-fashioned way of writing "telégrafo".
 
Well, I myself think that language control is good, but ok.

It isn't when it affects the very comprehension of the language. For instance, in Spoken French the passé simple (simple past) fell into disuse in favor of the passé composé (compound past), however, written French still uses both tenses and also prescribes some nuances to distinguish both, completely disregarding the regular use. Therefore, to simply read a French novel you'll need to familiarize yourself with a huge amount of verbs that you'll never really use when speaking to someone. Also, you need remember how complicated and irregular the verb system of the Romance languages are. Still, that's just an example!
 
It isn't when it affects the very comprehension of the language. For instance, in Spoken French the passé simple (simple past) fell into disuse in favor of the passé composé (compound past), however, written French still uses both tenses and also prescribes some nuances to distinguish both, completely disregarding the regular use. Therefore, to simply read a French novel you'll need to familiarize yourself with a huge amount of verbs that you'll never really use when speaking to someone. Also, you need remember how complicated and irregular the verb system of the Romance languages are. Still, that's just an example!
I don't know how hard the verb system in Romance can be, considering that my native language is considered to be one of the hardest languages in Europe to learn and has like 15 forms of verbs, but ok.

I thought nobody listens to Academie francaise, though?
 
I don't know how hard the verb system in Romance can be, considering that my native language is considered to be one of the hardest languages in Europe to learn and has like 15 forms of verbs, but ok.

Lithuanian must surely be one of the most difficult languages in Europe. I'll have to confess that I know next to nothing about it, still, all the grammar rules are applicable to the spoken language as well? That's my problem with the French Academy, it's too prescriptive and not descriptive at all, creating a huge gap between the spoken and the written language. I dare say that French today is almost diglotic (but I'll have to confess that this statement is somewhat controversial).

I thought nobody listens to Academie francaise, though?

It depends. Literary works still follow their rules. Still, most people don't really care about the Académie's nitpicking.
 

Vuru

Banned
Heck, here's the New English Alphabet i devised

Aa
Bb
Cc - recycled for /t͡ʃ/ (China = Caina) since English has no native "ts" sound the letter is often used for
Dd
Ee
Ff
Gg - now always /g/ (George is now written Jorj for example)
Hh
Ii
Jj - now always /d͡ʒ/ (George is now written Jorj for example)
Kk
Ll
Mm
Nn
Oo
Pp
Rr
Ss
Tt
Uu
Vv
Ww
Yy - now always /j/ (like in Yugoslavia)
Zz
Þþ - /θ/ (thing = þing)
Ðð - /ð/ (that = ðet)
Ʃʃ - /ʃ/ (sheet = ʃiit)
Ʒʒ - /ʒ/ (treasure = treʒur)

Q and X are meme letters so they are removed, but can be recycled

In the case of "elongated" vowels (don't know what it's called, but basically the ones written often as oo and ee), you just write the corresponding vowel twice

Instead of oo, it's uu
Instead of ee, it's ii
 
You don't necessarily need a single regulatory body for both the US and the UK. Chinese, Arabic and Portuguese are some of the most spoken languages in the world and have multiple regulatory bodies. Portuguese for instance have two academies, one in Lisbon and another in Rio and, despite the efforts of unification, Spelling in BrP and EP is not uniform and reflects the local dialects (that are much more divergent than AmE and BE.)

Likewise, French itself has multiple regulatory bodies. Canadian, Belgian and Swiss French do not necessarily follow the rulings of the Académie française.

French clearly doesn't have the most predictable orthography (almost as unpredictable as the English one imho)

While French spelling can appear complicated to newcomers, there are general patterns of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, and once you have learned them, you can usually predict how to pronounce an unfamiliar word by its spelling. What is trickier is that one sound can have multiple spellings.
 
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While French spelling can appear complicated to newcomers, there are general patterns of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, and once you have learned them, you can usually predict how to pronounce an unfamiliar word by its spelling. What is trickier is that one sound can have multiple spellings.

Yes, French have general patterns, so does English. Once you know the probable origin of any English word you can usually predict its spelling. The basic difference is that English drinks of too many sources. That said, compared to Spanish, Portuguese or Italian, French orthography still is very complex. Like I said before, why 'ff', 'f' and 'ph' all sound the same just because some 16th century aristocrats thought that it would be fun to revive Latin orthography? Someone with proper education can easily identify all these sounds with different spellings, but, could a poorly nourished 19th century factory worker understand it as well?
 
@Vuru, love your reformed English spelling, a colleague and I have been working on something similar (I'm a linguist).

In terms of getting a national regulatory body for English, the best time would be in the 17th/early 18th century, before US independence. This is also the time when such academies were getting started in other parts of Europe if I'm not mistaken, so an English one could be helped along by a general trend.

Any normalized, phonetic type of spelling would be based on the prestige variety, so likely London English, and of course the various other English dialects wouldn't conform to this. But that hasn't prevented a standard, phonetic spelling system from arising for Spanish, Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese, etc., so there's no reason it would for English either. The obstacles are more to do with politics and inertia than with any practical matters of implementing a reformed spelling (at least in that timeframe - the later you try, the harder it gets).
 
English, unlike many major languages, does not have a major regulatory body in the vein of the Academie francaise. This means that while spelling and grammar are held to generally looser rules, this also means that English evolves more rapidly as seen in its absorption of loan words.

So what PoD or circumstances would lead to English being regulated with an academic body?

An old soc.history.what-if post of mine (with minor changes):

***

The thread on Dr. Johnson and spelling reform reminded me that there were innumerable proposals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for an English Academy to be modeled after the Academie Francaise, to ensure the regularity of English usage as well as spelling.

There is an interesting discussion in Harrison Ross Steeves, *Learned Societies and English Literary Scholarship in Great Britain and the United States* (1913):

"One of the obvious results of the transference of the machinery of French pseudo-classicism to England in the seventeenth century is found in reiterated proposals, from many of the leading English men of letters of the day, for the founding of an English academy of letters which should have the same weight of critical authority as the French Academy. Projects for such an academy were offered by Sprat, Dryden, Defoe, Addison, and Swift, and more casual recommendations were made by James Howell, Milton, the Earl of Roscommon, Pope, and Prior;9 but these were without exception ineffective, although the idea was urged at intervals until the middle of the eighteenth century, when it was laid at rest, probably largely through the opposition of Dr. Johnson. In the absence of a special foundation for the improvement of the language, however, the Royal Society undertook, four years after its establishment in 1660, at least to acknowledge the want of an English academy by the appointment of a "Committee for Improving the English Tongue."10 No record is extant of definite results attained by this committee, although it is certain that they held some formal meetings...

"That the existence and relative effectiveness of the French Academy failed to bring about the establishment of such an institution in England, especially in an age so strongly under the dominance of French critical ideas, seems matter for real wonder. The reasons which Matthew Arnold suggests for the existence of the French Academy and the absence of a similar body in England--briefly, that the characteristic of the English mind is individual energy, of the French, openness and intellectual flexibility12--account probably for the readiness of the English to dispense with a check upon intellectual freedom. But these reasons are not properly historical reasons; they explain a condition, rather than trace the origins of an historical fact. It is probably correct to say, in a general way, that the greater intellectual democracy of the English could not submit to such a tyranny of trained taste; but a more real reason for the failure of the academy idea in England is probably to be found in the intellectual conditions which determined the particular nature of scholarly comity throughout this century, and which gave birth to the Royal Society itself.

"The Royal Society is as truly a coefficient of English intellectual interests in this period as the Academie Francaise is for France. Although at the first glance these two societies may seem to voice the same scholarly aims, no intellectual incentives could be more radically divergent than those which gave life to the two. The Academy owed its existence, under a nearly absolute political tyranny, to a demand for authority in matters of taste; the Royal Society responded to the growing outcry against everything savoring of scholastic authority, and stood as the expressed champion of the experimental philosophy of Bacon..." http://books.google.com/books?id=SrUkAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA40

Anyway, can anyone see a plausible way that one of the countless proposals for an English Academy could actually have succeeded, and if so what its effects would have been? It probably has to be before Dr. Johnson, during the seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, when the French cultural influence was greatest; by the nineteenth century, even Matthew Arnold, who had praised the effects of the Academie Francaise on French prose, and suggested that in some respects English literature suffered from the lack of such an Academy, ridiculed the idea that he was proposing an English Academy:

"Every one who knows the characteristics of our national life, and the tendencies so fully discussed in the following pages, knows exactly what an English Academy would be like. One can see the happy family in one's mind's eye as distinctly as if it was already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the Bishop of Oxford, Mr. Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr. Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve,--everything which is influential, accomplished, and distinguished; and then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. [1] Clearly, this is not what will do us good. The very same faults,--the want of sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in right reason, the dislike of authority,--which have hindered our having an Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature, would also hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which would really correct them. And culture, which shows us truly the faults, shows us this also just as truly." https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4212/4212-8.txt


[1] On Sala, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Augustus_Henry_Sala: "His literary style, highly coloured, bombastic, egotistic, and full of turgid periphrases, gradually became associated by the public with their conception of the Daily Telegraph; and though the butt of the more scholarly literary world, his articles were invariably full of interesting matter and helped to make the reputation of the paper..."

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