All In How You Spell It

Here is a challenge if there ever was one!

Supposing that, despite the advent of the printing press (which forced a sort of unofficial standardized spelling of words that led to later conventions), there was never any official standard for spelling the English language.

Also suppose that a number of central European characters that were either never extant in English or were phased out before 1800, such as the long or medial S (or the German "sharp S" that was derived from the short and long S written in tandem), had made their way into the language.

Givene ðe maßive differens in howe ðe ingliſh language uuould be ſpelte, uuat differens uuould it mäk in ðe hiſtorye of Anglofone peepols?

(given the massive difference in how the English language would be spelled, what difference would it make in the history of Anglophone peoples?)
 
I'd say it'd make the British Empire very difficult to run, and, in general, keep Anglophones down, rather than the historical industrial revolution and overall power of Anglophonic nations. This would make it difficult to become truly literate, which is not a good thing.
 

ninebucks

Banned
I'd say it'd make the British Empire very difficult to run, and, in general, keep Anglophones down, rather than the historical industrial revolution and overall power of Anglophonic nations. This would make it difficult to become truly literate, which is not a good thing.

I don't buy this at all. Standardised spellings can be just as much a hindrance to literacy as a benefit, especially in the English language, where certain words are spelt very illogically.

There is only so far you can mispell a word, its only going to be a very rare occurance where one anglophone sees a word written by another anglophone and has absolutely no idea what the word is supposed to be. The likely outcome is that people's reading vocabulary will widen, people will learn that people from London spell a word in one way, while people from Glasgow, Bombay, Johannesburg or Washington spell it in another way, and people will learn to shift their reading voice based on the dialectical clues from the 'mispellings', (historical linguists/linguistic historians find the study of nonstandardised spellings very useful, as it gives them vital clues as to what dialects certain writers are speaking).

So no, I don't think this will effect literacy, az liturut peepil haff no problum undustanding unorthudox spelingz.
 
I'd say it'd make the British Empire very difficult to run, and, in general, keep Anglophones down, rather than the historical industrial revolution and overall power of Anglophonic nations. This would make it difficult to become truly literate, which is not a good thing.

Well, first off, the British Empire as we know it would not exist, the butterflies would phase it out.

Secondly, I doubt that heightened dialectism (or however you call it) is going to be a serious hindrance to the Anglosphere as a whole. After all, German and Italian had (and have, in some cases) huge dialectal differences, yet the Reformation and Rennaisance emerged from those countries respectively.

I don't buy this at all. Standardised spellings can be just as much a hindrance to literacy as a benefit, especially in the English language, where certain words are spelt very illogically.

There is only so far you can mispell a word, its only going to be a very rare occurance where one anglophone sees a word written by another anglophone and has absolutely no idea what the word is supposed to be. The likely outcome is that people's reading vocabulary will widen, people will learn that people from London spell a word in one way, while people from Glasgow, Bombay, Johannesburg or Washington spell it in another way, and people will learn to shift their reading voice based on the dialectical clues from the 'mispellings', (historical linguists/linguistic historians find the study of nonstandardised spellings very useful, as it gives them vital clues as to what dialects certain writers are speaking).

So no, I don't think this will effect literacy, az liturut peepil haff no problum undustanding unorthudox spelingz.

I agree with this.

Butt fhin eghin, fhir's elsau fhu zhinss fhet ellojhekull spulings err pravalunt en ufhir dyulex tu.
 
So no, I don't think this will effect literacy, az liturut peepil haff no problum undustanding unorthudox spelingz.

The main thing is, though, farflung peoples have different accents. It's going to be much more difficult to read something written by someone with a heavy Afrikaans accent than the relative ease of something written by someone with an English or American accent. This might not cause problems at day to day levels, just normal correspondences, where you can take your time reading, and the language isn't too difficult, but it'd be a real pain in academic settings. The dissemination of knowledge across places with wide dialectical differences would be a real pain with no standardized spellings. I would imagine that there would be some standardization (in my own field, computer science, most programming languages are use English words, even if the code is written by a Frenchman, or a German, or whomever), but that goes against this WI.
 
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