Re:The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language
by kwhitefoot on Monday December 23, 2019 @05:44AM
(#21862794)
> think about 150-300 years in the future , do you think there will be no changes to cleanup things
You can change it and clean it up all you like but that won't stop its evolution and a hundred years later the spelling and pronunciation will be out of sync again.
I don't mean that we should necessarily avoid reform but what you get when you do a serious reform is a new language that is different from all the dialects and it must either be imposed from above or be in some way sufficiently attractive for people to adopt it. And then you have another dialect.
See also the xkcd joke on standards, I think it applies here too: https://xkcd.com/927/
You can change it and clean it up all you like but that won't stop its evolution and a hundred years later the spelling and pronunciation will be out of sync again.
I don't mean that we should necessarily avoid reform but what you get when you do a serious reform is a new language that is different from all the dialects and it must either be imposed from above or be in some way sufficiently attractive for people to adopt it. And then you have another dialect.
See also the xkcd joke on standards, I think it applies here too: https://xkcd.com/927/