Roosevelt Spelling Reform

Lots of non phonetic spellings. What is the point of having "Ph" make an "f" sound? Also why does it need to be "have" instead of "hav" or "tough" instead of "tuff"?
Your last example is moot because tuff is something completely different; namely a type of rock.
 
Really?









You rate English as easy, based off its lack of grammatical gender. Fair enough (as someone who did German in school, I hated grammatical gender with a passion). Problem is, Finnish doesn't have a grammatical gender either. Or a future tense. And vanishingly few prepositions. And, unlike English, it actually obeys grammatical gender, and is nearly completely phonetic. Finnish ought to be the easiest language in the world, by your reasoning... except that it is commonly considered one of the hardest (on account of the fourteen cases thing. Which is unfair. The nastiest thing about Finnish is the consonant mutation).

I'd say it's really swings and roundabouts. What makes English uniquely easy, I think, is that it is so easy to achieve the all-important immersion. English is everywhere.
Then again to a speaker of an Indo-European language the Uralic languages would always seem difficult. Hungarian always seems fiendish to me.
 

BossaNova

Banned
Speaking as a foreigner, I don't think English spelling is as problematic as some make it out to be; you just need to brute-force it. The combination of passive immergence and the fact English is everywhere these days make this prettty do-able. Grammar on the other hand...why is there a difference between than and then? Or "a" and "an"?
 
Speaking as a foreigner, I don't think English spelling is as problematic as some make it out to be; you just need to brute-force it. The combination of passive immergence and the fact English is everywhere these days make this prettty do-able. Grammar on the other hand...why is there a difference between than and then? Or "a" and "an"?
"A" before consonants "An" before vowels and sometimes "H", it just makes it sound better when pronounced most of the time.
 
Well, not what I meant (I might have mispoke).
Let's say, you're speaking about a chair.
If you say "The Chair is broken", "I seat next to the chair." "This piece of wood is from the chair." or "This is the chair's cushion." you write the chair in the same way.
In German, it'd be (in order) Der Stuhl (Nomative), Den Stuhl (accusative), Dem Stuhl (dative), Des Stuhles (genitive)

You are correct. English doesn't inflect the definite article (it does inflect the indefinite article - a/an). But English does have cases (subjective, objective, and possessive), which correspond to nominative, accusative, and genitive respectively. This is a Germanic language, after all - we just lost the dative.

As for declensions...

He is on the chair, the chair is beneath him, the chair is his.

And it's For Whom the Bell Tolls, not for For Who the Bell Tolls.

Of course, that's the key point and you're entirely right! English is spoken everywhere and easily accessible compared to German, which has a limited cultural output

The internet's actually an amazing resource for achieving language immersion - I wish it'd been more common when I was doing German. It's particularly helpful for me now that I've picked up Finnish as a hobby - Finland's cultural output being far more obscure than Germany's.
 
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An interesting bit of English I have seen trip non-native speakers up.. "an historical city," versus "an historic city."
 
Most of these are good changes. That said, dropping the e after g (acknowledgment, e.g.) actually messes with phonetics rules. It makes spelling less phonetic rather than more. And replacing 'ed' with 't' makes spelling conform more to pronunciation but at the price of complicating the spelling rules. A rule that you add 'ed' to create the past participle is simpler than one where sometimes you add a 't' instead.

Actually phonetically we don't even pronounce the e in words like bridge or acknowledge even though in spelling for whatever reason it is required to make that sound. There's also the fact that it's already an option to drop it in some words like judgment for example so it wouldn't be a huge change just one people would have to get used to.

In spelling it may seem weird to have an irregular rule where a past tense verb is either spelled ending in -ed or -t but technically we already have that rule in English grammar we just don't express it orthographically. It wouldn't actually be too hard to learn once you realize that's what's actually going on in the first place when you pronounce the word.
 
BTW since you're from England, I can tell you that there's no point in having the U in words like color or flavor.
It's just what people are used to and I'm sorry if I seemed rude. I think people are resistant to spelling reform just because they are so familiar with the current forms. As far as keeping the French-derived -our endings, I think it is now a case of,"lets show everybody we're not American and we'll darned well do it our way" even if, I think, the French themselves have gone for -or in some cases. As we don't have an equivalent of the French Academy; I don't see the UK adopting any radical spelling changes in the near future except by the natural drift of usage and the fact that there are far more users of American English than the British convention.
 
Speaking as a foreigner, I don't think English spelling is as problematic as some make it out to be; you just need to brute-force it. The combination of passive immergence and the fact English is everywhere these days make this prettty do-able. Grammar on the other hand...why is there a difference between than and then? Or "a" and "an"?

Interestingly, ‘a’ and ‘an’ really depend on when you’re asking. You could have ‘a numpire’ or ‘an umpire’ depending on the century.
 
It's just what people are used to and I'm sorry if I seemed rude. I think people are resistant to spelling reform just because they are so familiar with the current forms. As far as keeping the French-derived -our endings, I think it is now a case of,"lets show everybody we're not American and we'll darned well do it our way" even if, I think, the French themselves have gone for -or in some cases. As we don't have an equivalent of the French Academy; I don't see the UK adopting any radical spelling changes in the near future except by the natural drift of usage and the fact that there are far more users of American English than the British convention.
Also the fact that most autocorrects are now calibrated on American English
 

Driftless

Donor
...and the fact that there are far more users of American English than the British convention.

What is the dominant form for spelling/pronunciation/usage in the lands that were part of the British Empire? I'd think it would be based on the British model. Even if local languages are the Lingua Franca;) for a given country, English is likely to be the language of business and diplomacy. i.e. Hindi may be the primary language of several hundred million people in India, but where English is used, it is probably using British conventions? Anecdotally, I'm from the Upper Great Lakes Area of the US. I think my accent is less different from my Canadian neighbors to the north than it is to other US regions - but the Canadians mostly use British spelling and usage to my knowledge.
 
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An interesting bit of English I have seen trip non-native speakers up.. "an historical city," versus "an historic city."
To be fair, that one trips up a hell of a lot of native English speakers too... although I suspect it has rather more to do with the quality of the speaker’s education in the language than anything else.

On the simplified spelling itself:
1) I can’t be the only person looking at those alternate spellings and thinking at least half of them look less phonetic than the spellings they’re supposed to replace in the first place! I mean really, some of those are just awful.

2) I like English. I think it can be a really beautiful language when spoken or written well. In the written form I particularly enjoy literature and argument. Those spellings are a monstrosity and an abomination that English, despite its many sins, was thankfully spared.
 
What is the dominant form for spelling/pronunciation/usage in the lands that were part of the British Empire? I'd think it would be based on the British model. Even if local languages are the Lingua Franca;) for a given country, English is likely to be the language of business and diplomacy. i.e. Hindi may be the primary language of several hundred million people in India, but where English is used, it is probably using British conventions? Anecdotally, I'm from the Upper Great Lakes Area of the US. I think my accent is less different from my Canadian neighbors to the north than it is to other US regions - but the Canadians mostly use British spelling and usage to my knowledge.
Sorry, I'd forgotten about the multitudes of Indian English users that use the British spelling convention. I think most of the rest of the Commonwealth use our spellings too. I can only think of one Australian spelling conversion to the US system, in that one of their major political parties is the Labor Party as opposed to the Labour Party in the UK.
 
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