(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...)
The Académie has no authority whatsoever, it's little more than a club for writers. The Education Ministry has authority for school programs and what is accepted in French language classes, but only in France. It only ever allows new uses, never forbids previously allowed things.
The OQLF (and French language Ministry) has a broader authority within Québec, but only for Québec.
The Ministry of Culture has some authority within the Brussels-Wallonia federation but it's quite limited.
No idea what it's like in Switzerland.
But there is no global authority for the French language (unlike German or Dutch for example). The language evolves by consensus.
I don't think an English standardization would change much in how people actually speak.
Imagine some would stick with original "bonjour" (Qubec), other more progressive would simplify to "bojur" and whatnote.
You have the same with "colour" and "color". Or "night" and "nite". From my observatio where you have some language authority there is at least consisten spelling (and english spelling is all over the place)
en_US vs. en_GB
fr_CA vs fr_FR
Besides, in case of Spanish the spelling is more uniform. Aforementioned locales are mostly for GUIs and regional wording differences. And the thread started with "unifying english spelling" which is just a mess…
As I recall, the American spelling of color and other words like that was actually dictated by a "pompous authority", namely Noah Webster, who write the dictionary bearing his name. He wanted to simplify some spellings he saw as overly complicated. I happen to agree with him, but this wasn't because of regular, everyday people in different regions.
I honestly don’t care if someone uses “color” or “colour” or makes ghoti jokes at the English language’s expense.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world outside of your beloved "anglosphere" using wrong spelling results in said "anglosphereian" being utterly butthurt.
Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
Don’t put words in my mouth.
> Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
The rest of the world could. They won’t. But they could. You could use this as part of your spelling reforms: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 :)
VOA also have a Learning English spec for broadcast english [1] but that seems to be a lot looser of a spec.
So it's definitely not impossible. The funny thing, is I remember being told in grade school that in English Canada, I was to write numbers with a space as the thousands separator. `$10 000.00`, instead of `$10,000.00`. This is because french Canada uses a comma as a decimal point, `10 000.00 $`, so a space is non ambiguous. I have rarely ever seen the English space format in use here. I don't think English speakers would respect any authority if it wasn't as domain-scoped as Aviation or Learning english.
[0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_English_(version_of_E...
https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28433818/working-docume...
Well, it's definitely not impossible to publish a document declaring itself the standard form of english.
But I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to get english speakers to comply - or even to get any countries to make the standard legally binding.
From my observation adoption of english (and it's slang) is mostly due to "verbal colonialism" - pop culture mixed with "we work in english" spiced with "I'm cool so I'll drop this pointless slang from foreign language"...
That's even less likely now than in the past, with the elite cultural trends in English-speaking countries favoring the adoption of foreign spellings and pronunciation. That just piles on the complexity to unmanageable levels.
IMHO, for instance, there's no excuse for the requirement that English newspaper readers know Pinyin [1], rather than some more English-friendly romanization system, to be able to read news about China, when Chinese speakers themselves use a completely different, non-roman writing system. What's next, just printing the Chinese characters without romanization? Pinyin has its uses, but writing things out for foreigners is not something it does well.
[1] which gives many letters very unexpected values (e.g. c = ts) and many vowels are impossible for an English-speaker to guess correctly.
I do agree that the currently dominant English convention of adopting spelling from other languages (or their standard Romanization system) as is - or worse yet, dropping all the diacritics but keeping everything else as is - is misguided. But it doesn't help that English spelling can get very unwieldy when trying to spell something phonetically, especially across many dialects of English due to considerable variability in how things are pronounced. This has also caused problems - for an example of that, look at the still-common Korean Romanization of names such as "Park" which does not accurately represent the actual pronunciation if you pronounce it as an American would ("r" is silent - it reflects the non-rhotic British pronunciation, and was put there because the more straightforward "Pak" would tend to be pronounced incorrectly by a Brit).
For instance the current PRC secretary name is pronounced accordingly to the characters' reading in Taiwan and Japan, and won't have much in common. Same way Chinese people will read Japanese name as the characters sound to them, without referring to the actual Japanese reading, even if in Japan these names have a designated original reading.
It's pretty good for Mandarin speakers. It's terrible for English speakers.
> Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”?
English friendly is something that will produce reasonably-close approximate pronunciations by an English reader without any extra foreign-language training. Basically, something that prioritizes following existing English orthography (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language.
I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
It's not an issue of cultural dominance, as no one would be forcing the Chinese to change their names or their pronunciations. It's basically just keeping English from being even more unmanageable, in a way many other languages do, including Chinese.
If an English name or other word is used in Chinese (or in Japanese, or many other languages) it gets localized. For instance, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2xYvMcW2A. The Chinese speakers are mostly talking about Trump, but the only name I could actually pick out was Obama's (probably because "Trump" is hard to pronounce in Chinese).
Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us."
Also, the English use of Pinyin can have some unfortunate effects. I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" almost 100% of the time (there was a strong preference for first-name use in the office, so it rarely happened to his face).
Consider a rather unusual (but real nevertheless) Polish surname: «Brzęczyszczykiewicz». Most native English speakers, who are not well known for their patience with long and unusually looking non-native surnames, will instantly give up and shorten it to a mere «B». The most daring and adventurous ones will persevere and will likely arrive at something akin to «Brenshistishkevich», which is neither correct nor easily pronounceable for an English speaker anyway. The few English speakers who are acquainted with Polish, would render and pronounce «Brzęczyszczykiewicz» as «Bzhenchishchikyevich» which is closer to truth, yet it will confuse everyone else who will stick with «Brenshistishkevich» anyway.
Or consider an Icelandic surname of «Þórðarson». We would have «Thordarson» (as a naïve take) or «Thortharson» (somewhat closer to the actual Icelandic version).
Bonus point: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a Welsh surname, with the «colloquial» vocalisation of «Lanfarpwilgwingle» vs «Hlan-fair-pool-gwin-gith» (a more truthful rendition).
In all cases, with Brenshistishkevich, Thordarson and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, we have arrived at the English equivalent of Te Lang Pu (Trump). In fact, there is no need to look at more extreme cases, it will suffice to consider a simple Vietnamese name of «Huy», which most English speakers will pronounce as «Hughey» whereas it is actually «Hwee» – it is still the case of the English Te Lang Pu.
In the case of Mandarin Chinese, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Chinese writing script is logographic and can't encode single consonants (single sounds in general, although there are Chinese characters that encode vowelled words, usually exclamations). Secondly (or firstly, in fact), all Chinese languages have a strict rule of a phoneme having the CV(C) structure (Consonant-Vowel(maybe another Consonant)), which makes the CCVCC (i.e. Trump) compound impossible and is completely against the phonetic rules of the language. And many, very many in fact, Chinese speakers neither know pinyin nor speak English. The same is true for many other non-Chinese languages.
It gets a bit better, e.g., in Japanese that, other than the logographic script, has two syllabaries that make it possible to represent Trump as something probably more like Tu-ru-mpu.
> I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" […]
Since you also earlier called out «[…] (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language», spelling Cao as Tsao (which is what they do in Taiwan but not in the mainland) is not going help as nearly all English speakers will drop the «t» and pronounce it as «Sao». And, since «ts» is one sound and not two, «Sao» is also the English Te Lang Pu.
How could it? English is not a tonal language at all, so how could you possibly represent tonality with Latin characters, in a way that English speakers with no extra training could read such text and pronounce the Chinese word in an acceptable way? I don't think it's possible. It's just like trying to use Japanese characters to represent English names: a LOT is lost in translation, because there's simply no way to represent all English sounds in Japanese, since Japanese has far fewer possible sounds than English.
>It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
But it's not, English is, like it or not. If you want to communicate with someone in any random country in the world, you have a very good chance of doing so if you speak English, regardless of your or the listener's native language. The same isn't true for Mandarin.
The Mainlanders would find it very insulting to not use Pinyin when referring to subjects in the PRC, so understandably, American journalism goes along with that.
For what it's worth I think both systems have different disadvantages, in that neither does a good job of reflecting the actual pronunciation of Guoyu. Excuse me, Putonghua. Doing so with the English character set isn't actually possible.
The US doesn't use Imperial units; it uses "US Customary" units. They're not the same, though there is some overlap. Imperial units are used in the UK, which is why they're called "imperial" (from "empire"--the British Empire). Imperial inches, for instance, are the same as US inches (2.54cm), but UK/Imperial gallons are quite different from US gallons, which is why the miles-per-gallon ratings for cars are so different between the two countries.
> guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography
gives a somewhat false impression regarding the influence and standing of this body. Orthography was traditionally what was written in the Duden dictionary/thesaurus. Only in 2004 or so there was a push for a moderate reform for German as taught in schools, and it was deemed necessary to have at least Austria and Switzerland join (hence the council isn't a natioval body), whereas neighbouring countries with German-speaking minorities such as Italy were not sitting at the table it seems.
Erm... curious that you brought that up as I lived in Chile for a couple of years and now in Spain. And while I agree that Chilean Spanish is wild it does follow RAE spelling guidelines, or at the very least I haven't seen any obvious deviations. Now there's a lot of modismos ("chilenismos", local words formed usually by borrowing from natives Mapuche in south or Quechua in the north) but they still tend to follow more-or-less spelling. Accent/pronounciation is yet another thing but that doesn't affect spelling all that much. And on top of that there is a lot of "mutilation" of words when using whatsapp (either being in a hurry or being from low social background) but even in even so slightly more formal setting people immediatelly fallback to official spelling.
(Spanish is more gracefull when it comes to spelling as "what you hear you write" and vice versa so maybe the problem is less pronounced)
I doubt either country will ever accept the other's version.
As a fellow French speaker, I think these are strengths other languages could gain from. Couriel or email (or e-mail)? Speaker’s choice. Same for possession. (Particularly for a culture with a tradition of individual liberty like France.)
Anyway, yeah, I love this sort of mixing of languages and I’m glad a lot of cultures are more open about mixing in English.
I suppose languages evolve around the way their corresponding population brains work. People can still learn other languages, or be native to other languages, but there is a language way that is the best fit to some people which is related to biology.
However, natural languages evolve naturally, which means that they don't just suddenly randomly change, and that change is very gradual. So things tend to get stuck in historically-motivated local maximums that can be very different for different languages because of their different histories.
There are some plausible theories around biologically motivated language features, but this tends to be about the environment - e.g. some sounds seem to be more common in languages spoken in high-altitude areas.
[1]https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/english-just-badly-pronounc...
No, English is a Germanic language whose conjugation rules have severely atrophied, with (mostly specialized!) terminology liberally adopted from Latin, Greek, and other roots. In things like tense and aspect structure, I believe that English hews a lot closer to German than French.
Then, under French influence probably, the plural, you, started being used as a polite form as well (in French, like most romance languages, formal/polite language uses the plural form of pronouns and verbs when addressing a single person). Thou, my friend VS You, sir; similar to "toi, mon ami" vs "vous, monsieur".
Then, this polite form using singular you became so widely used that thou was almost entirely dropped, especially since English also had little distinction between singular and plural in verbs in general. You, my friend, you, my friends.
Then, as thou became more foreign to regular speakers, it briefly started being used as a polite form, essentially reversing the original meanings. You, my friend VS Thou, sir.
This didn't last very long, so finally we ended up with the current state, where there is no polite form and you is the only second person pronoun. Except of course some speakers have started using y'all for a plural form, but that doesn't seem to be gaining any popularity outside a few areas.
Amusingly, using the French words is a signal to being upper class. Such as "purchase" (pourchacier) instead of "buy" (byan).
It's a pretty common thing worldwide, though. French played a similar role as upper class marker in many other countries that were influenced by it when France was at the peak of its global dominance. For Slavic languages, German also played this role at one point, and IIRC there is something similar historically with Chinese in areas in its cultural dominance.
Those crazy Masoretic Jews trying to pollute sacred texts with vowels... You're just supposed to know them!
Punctuation was probably introduced by leaky quills dripping until someone put a positive spin on it.
What twist of fate gave us ampersands? Lets keep Ye Olde English pure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Modern_English
I was taught that this is because the Normans pushed the Germanics out and up north. French dominated the royal court.
1. You can’t take things language related from France at face value - they probably have a bias. They have a strong cultural pride and protection over their language. They also have a strong history of political agendas pushing their language as the “international” language. I say this as a non-French speaker of the French language, and I mean no disrespect to the French people. It’s just a cultural element formed over hundreds of years of government policy.
2. The origins of English is not French, but there are many words in English derived from French. But today they’re English words, with a French history. There are many more words that are not French in origin, so it’s quite disingenuous to call English an “incorrect” or “mispronounced” French. Why is it not an “evolved” or “improved” French? (See point 1).
3. English is conjugated, it’s just different than French. “I am, you are, he is”. “I look, you look, he looks”. Or more obviously “I jump, I jumped, I am jumping”. Most of the French-origin words are also probably not verbs but nouns. That said, I have no data to back that up.
Oh totally, my American accent sounds just like, "quand je vais au barbecue le quatre juillet, je vais manger un hot dog avec ketchup."
> But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language.
They're loanwords that changed over time, they're not "badly" pronounced at all. French is filled with many loanwords as well that are pronounced nothing like their language of origin
There's always a relation between a spoken word and its written representation, they're the same thing in different mediums.
There was an interesting study (https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/) where they evaluated phonemicity of various language orthographies by training a neural net and then seeing how accurately it could predict things. Of two dozen languages they had there, the only ones that scored worse for writing are French and Chinese, but most notably, English is the only one that scored below 50% accuracy for reading, and with a significant gap at that. This is very unfortunate for an international language, since reading is kind of the most basic practical thing you can usually do with a second language.
- words spoken by toddlers: what's the spelling of a word that doesn't exist outside of a kid's brain ? In particular parents can accept it as a word without ever setting an associated writing.
- written words that don't have a pronounciation: typically Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced is up to how we feel about it.
That's without going into words with phonems unrelated to their written form (XIV as fourteen for instance) and I assume there will be words that exchange spelling and pronounciation with others.
Languages are plenty weird, we should embrace their weirdity IMHO.
How words were pronounced can be deduced from poetry.
Of course. But it's not like we know nothing about it.
I hate that the past tense of "stay" is "stayed", but "say" is "said" and "pay" is "paid", which is often misspelled as "payed", which IS a word, but is unrelated to transferring money from one person to another.
Then you got all the ways "-ough" is pronounced. Thorough, enough, cough, through, thought, dough, drought..."-ough" is now looking like a completely nonsense letter sequence.
> To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.
Esperanto is not a "global international neutral language" either. While artificially constructed, it's functionally a Romance language, deriving over 80% of its vocabulary as well as the majority of its grammatical structure from Latin and/or Romance languages. The majority of the remainder comes from other European languages, primarily Germanic languages.
Also, interestingly enough, Esperanto attracted more interest in some Asian countries - most notably, Japan - than in much of Europe.
I think the bigger problem with Esperanto is phonology. It's too heavy on affricates, including some relatively rare ones (e.g. phonemic "ts"), and the consonant clusters get pretty bad. For someone coming from a simple CV language, those are likely to be a bigger challenge than the word list.
and some minor contribution from the Normans of course...
Being a linga-frinca has nothing to do with merits though.
Aside from "linga franca" being literally "French", it's a matter of which group of nations have a tremendously dominant position on the international scene. If China was to take hold of India and Russia and set the rules for the rest of the world, the defacto linga-frinca won't be English for long, however intricate people might feel about Chinese.
I live in Germany now. There are 10-15 times more German speakers in the DACH area than there are French speakers in Quebec. Even then, it’s weird that companies no longer bother translating their ads and slogans for the German-speaking market. It’s somewhat sad that every culture is slowly becoming a vaguely American, California-based culture.
Language and culture are intertwined. I feel that with the globalisation of both, something of value is lost. It’s only right to feel concerned about it.
One of the most fascinating things I learned about language in college when I was working towards my degree in Anthropology, a graduate student who was my class did their Master's on the linguistic differences between European French and the French Canadian (specifically the Quebec version) versions of the language. She did extensive research on the origins of the language and why they diverged.
Absolutely fascinating work.
On a lighter note, I happened to play hockey with many, many Canadian players. My best friend was from Ottawa and everybody asked him if he spoke French and said he did and said, "Its like here, you feel like you're speaking French with a Kentucky accent." which always got a good laugh from our teammates.
The story I heard about how Rumantsch (~40k L1) became the 4th language of switzerland is that one day toward the middle of last century, after Mussolini said that rumantsch speakers were just a bunch of farmers who didn't know how to speak proper italian, the swiss people essentially said « Esti d'épais à marde ! » by voting to make it official.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjoCmyhTSBU
I know some people that talk to there parents in Rumantsch that but most likely wont teach it to their children.
It will survive but its not really thriving either. Other languages is a great way to push against an 'enemy' language, like the revival of Gaulish in Ireland.
But we will get pretty good AI of it since there is so much official documentation in it.
(after all, even Gian and Giachen speak german)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxMuCyzXgC4
That said, it's still a massive improvement on English phonologically. Even if you only consider the simpler American varieties, the three-way æ/ɐ/ɑ distinction alone (as in bat vs but vs bar) is a huge WTF for anyone coming from a typical 5-vowel system. And then you have consonants like θ and ð that don't have clear 1:1 counterparts in most other languages, often not even as allophones of something else that you could point at.
Still, if you want to see what a more modern take on the concept might look like, I believe Globasa (https://www.globasa.net/eng) is the most active project along those lines. Of course, realistically, the likelihood of it actually being adopted as the universal language is effectively nil, but then that's also the case for Esperanto.
But I agree that overly large phonemic inventory is a problem. On the other hand, it seems that languages either have a complex consonant system but a simple vowel system; or a simple consonant system but a complex vowel system; I haven't yet seen a language where both systems are simple (Japanese vowels have tonality, so it's not a simple system IMHO), probably because the words in such a language would have to be quite long.
There are quite a few languages where both vowel and consonant systems are simple - just look at Polynesian languages such as Māori. The latter's vowel system is 5-vowel, and "long vowels" are phonemically vowel sequences that span moras. But, yes, it does mean that you end up with long words such as "whakararurarutia". That said, it's a rather extreme case, and one can still construct fairly simple but rich consonant systems in practice, because it's basically combinatorics - adding just one more bit of information doubles the domain space! So e.g. if you start with a strict CV consonant system and allow C(l/r)V, that's almost 4x as many contrasting syllables. Make it C(l/r/w/y)V(C) like in Globasa, and even with considerable restrictions on clustering stops etc this is enough for most words to be 3 syllables or less, and for most function words to be 1 syllable.
Now, the real success of Esperanto is that it does have an over 1 century international active community that does produce it’s own cultural artifacts, using Esperanto as a communication mean. All that without a bound army to back it at any point, that’s probably an unique feat in human history. Also to make it clear, it was not meant to be a universal language, but an international one.
Personally, I love that projects like Globasa comes to live. On a pragmatic level, large scale adoption is unlikely, but that is the case of any human endeavor. Let’s make sure that grandiloquence result likeliness never inhibit beautiful dreams being pursued.
Aside: I used to assume the term referred to how French was once "the language of diplomacy", but it really comes from "Frankish", at a time when "Franks" was a broad term for peoples of what is now western Europe.
All languages evolve through time, but I think that a major factor of evolution was the fact that it was accepted ~20 years ago that it's OK to write phonetically at school. And now we have school teachers that learned that way so it's definitely a standard feature of the current French.
For example the following hilarious reader comment in the economic news website "La Tribune":
"plutot que dire 18 milliares de deficte pour faire les gros titres il serais plus interessant de dire d'ou vient le soit disant deficite . La secu ne serait elle pas victime de paiement de prestations qui ne la concerne pas . qui s'en richie sur son dos ? N y aurit il pas des acteurs economiques qui ne participeraient pas a son financement et par contre lui demanderait des presttions ? c'est cela que lon veut savoir un peut comme les retriates ou le regime generale eponge les déficites qui ne le concerne pas par ce que letat ne finance pas les retaites de la fonction publique a son juste niveau."
While it may be accidental, maybe stemming the tide against Franglais will have a large secondary benefit for the minority language speakers of France. If your average native Gallo(e.g.) speaker needs to learn French in order to watch the news, that's one thing. If they then need to learn a bunch of English in order to speak French, well there's even less of a chance that they'll be able to spend a lot of their life speaking Gallo.
IDK maybe it will make no difference for those languages; French will crowd them out regardless of how much English there is in French.
Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_endangered_languages
There are also a measurable economical issues for non-English-native nations to have to use the de facto lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language.
To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.
Fun fact, Germany has a city where street names and many other things are translated in Esperanto: https://uea.facila.org/artikoloj/movado/la-esperanto-urbo-r3...