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Is Simplified Spelling Worth Reform?
digitalhermit writes "I guess many folks are of very little brain, and big words bother them... There's a push for simpler spelling. Instead of 'weigh' it would be 'way.' 'Dictionary' would be 'dikshunery' and so forth. Dunno if it's a joke, but it seems in earnest. Mark Twain must be spinning around somewhere." Twain is often credited with the satirical call for spelling reform called "A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling," though according to Wikipedia, Twain was "actually a supporter of reform," and the piece may have been written by M.J. Shields. Benjamin Franklin was another champion of spelling reform, and even came up with a phonetic alphabet to implement such reform.
The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement
has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for
European communications, rather than German, which was the other
possibility. As part of negotiations, her Majesty Government
conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and
has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as
EuroEnglish (Euro for short).
In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c".
Sertainly, sivil servants will reseive this news with joy. Also,
the hard "c" will be replased with "k". Not only will this klear
up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when
the troublesome "ph" will be replased by "f". This will make
words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be
expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are
possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double
letters, which have always been a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the
languag is disgraful, and they would go.
By the forth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as
replasing "th" by "z" and "w" by "v". During ze fifz year ze
unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar
changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz year, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer
vil be no mor trobls or difikultis and evrivum vil find it ezi tu
understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru.
This sig doesnt exist.
Those aren't rules. That's documentation and guidance maybe but not rules.
The mere fact that there is a category "usually [masculine, feminine, neutral]"
should tell you that there is no first principles way to determine the gender.
Notice also that the "always [masculine, feminine, neutral]" also has exceptions.
Latin-derived grammars are usually a pain in the ass because of genders, irregular
verbs, and noun cases. German suffers from all of those. English has fewer
irregularities (gerund; too many tenses, like the conditional tenses that few
people use; rather arbitrary use of "a" vs. "the", etc). That said, I am not
aware of a language with a simple consistent grammar with no exceptions to just
a few simple rules (unlambda is the only one and that's for computers only).
(OT: Do American bibles still use the archaic language forms e.g. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's spelling system", or have they been "modernised"?)