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The World's Languages Are Fast Becoming Extinct
Ant sends news of a report, released a couple of weeks back by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, on the alarming rate of extinction of the world's languages. While half of all languages have gone extinct in the last 500 years, the half-life is dropping: half of the 7,000 languages spoken today won't exist by the year 2100. The NY Times adds this perspective: "83 languages with 'global' influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."
Wouldn't this be a good thing? Less languages will mean more people speaking the same one, thus promoting better communication.
Not everything that is old, traditional, or entrenched has the value nostalgia makes us want to apply to it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
To me, extinction of lots of languages is a good thing ( especially if it includes COBOL :). With one common language, we may have a better chance of understanding each other. Remember the biblical tale of Babel, in which the profusion of languages was supposedly a punishment? How did we acquire the idea that languages have some values of their own? A language is a tool, to be replaced with a better one when it comes along.
I recently heard that a language goes extinct every 14 days, which for some reason pisses me off. No, I'm not pissed off that languages are going away (though I can see more value in them than some here), but rather that it would be expressed that way. Clearly it is meaningless to talk about this kind of change in a time frame of days, so the only reason to state "every 14 days", instead of a more meaningful figure like 250/decade would be to try to manipulate the listener into action.
But while linguists would like to make this out to be a calmity similar to wildlife extinction (hence the manipulation), there really is no practical solution to this situation; you can't force a language to live on - people either have a use for it, or they don't.
70% of the world can't even read or write their own languages.
a single language will go a long way towards resolving disputes and possibly even wars.
Different cultures must assimilate into the global culture or become obsolete.
On the other hand, these disappearing cultures have a lot to teach us.
Tribal wisdom must be translated and passed down to be preserved for the remainder of human history.
They're using their grammar skills there.
This is merely another symptom of humanity lurching steadily toward a drab, gray, intellectually sterile future, where cultural diversity will be eclipsed by monotony. In a monolingual, monocultural future, people all around the globe will be able to talk alright, but there will be much less to talk about.
Ah, well. As the late great Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "So it goes."
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Yes! Now that everyone is finally picking up on THE language, Esperanto, soon everyone will understand everyone else!!
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Who cares? The ones who seek to gain political power by setting us against one another. These folks wish to accentuate the differences between different ethnic groups. when the majority is portrayed as evil and the minority as victims both guilt and false empathy become very strong political tools. These tools are used to control the actions of both majority and the minority. When all humans can speak the same language(s) it will be the beginning of the end of this artificial dividing line. Perhaps then all can celebrate our inherent sameness. Perhaps then mankind can learn compassion and come to understand one another on a deeper level than even word alone can allow.
That always semed a bit hysterical. Was there any evidence to that, or were the pundits just insane?
Actually, I was joking around, but, you could make a case for it:
a) There's no requirement to learn english in the USA - everything is in mixed english / spanish anymore.
b) spanish speaking immigrants have a much higher birthrate than do other minorities. In fact, other minorities are barely keeping on a sustainable level.
So, you take the trend that there will be little adoption of english by the immigrant minority, realize that they have the higher birthrate, and what do you get? If its reasonable to extrapolate out environmental fears by a couple decades, if not centuries, then why would it be hysterical to apply the same trends in languages out by a few generations.
This is my sig.
English, as a language, is a tar baby. Punch it and it will stick to you. English is wiping other languages out (becoming the lingua franca, if you will) for two -- no, three -- reasons. One, money and power. Two, it's as flexible as it is convoluted. Three, pure entertainment.
Don't think American's use collective nouns? Bull. Don't think British English uses the subjective form? They must not be watching TV.
If you want rigid adherence to rules of grammar and spelling that don't keep up with the actual usage, go speak French. Or Latin. Or be the 27th idiot to learn Esperanto, which has no problem keeping up with actual usage (your contributions would be welcome, I'm sure).
Now, excuse me while I lie about getting laid.
There have been thousands of cultures that have developed, sometimes to world-conquering levels, then faded and disappeared. Some did so naturally through being unable to self-sustain, others were the result of genocide or forced assimilation. Whether you feel sad about it or not, if Hitler had succeeded the Jewish culture would definitely not be the first to disappear through violent means. Not by a long shot.
The difference now is that there are forces that speed up the extinction of non-self-sustaining types of cultures. Here in Canada there are more than a few First Nations languages which no more than a couple of people still speak. These are being recorded and documented as quickly as possible but it is understood that these will die out as soon as there is no one who needs to use them as part of their daily existence.
Is it sad that this is happening? Only if you don't realize the fact that the only reason there are so many different languages on earth is because of historic geographic isolation of all the different peoples. With instant worldwide communication and the ability to travel to just about any spot on the earth within a day or two, the conditions that allowed disparate languages and cultures to develop in the first place no longer exist.
That being said, languages are still developing and evolving, but now due more to artificial forces such as intentional introduction of slang as personal identification and new technologies and methods that need new terms to describe. e.g.: "Double-click the minimize control to select the desired HDMI input". Perfectly understandable to you and me, complete gibberish to most people over 50. And that's just in English.
We live in interesting times. The second case of technological development having a profound effect on all mankind, the first being the industrial revolution. I believe this second phase will have a much greater effect than the first.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Various words just have no real translation. "Gesellig" (Dutch) just means so much more than the dictionary equivalents: genial, social. Similarly "mana" (Maori) means more than just pride or spirit.
Kill a language and you kill a culture. Kill a culture and you end up with disaffected people. You just need to look at Inuit, Uustalian Aboriginal and various other groups to see that this is a bad thing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
would it be a good things if most of the worlds religions are facing extinction, wouldn't that be a good thing? Less wars? ...
Just out of curiosity,
What religion was China with 129,000,000 dead in the 20th century?
What religion was the USSR with 72,000,000 dead in the 20th century?
What religion where the Nazi's with 21,000,000 dead?
What religion was Cambodia with 2,035,000 dead?
That brings us to ~200,000,000 for Communism, and atheist creed, and 21,000,000 for Nazism a pseudo-religious creed (IIRC, its official religious view was a state concocted Lutheranism with Paganism and a heavy dose of militarism, obviously designed to ween the population off Christianity and onto state controlled propoganda)
Yeah, obviously religion is the problem.
In fact, the only major religion that has Holy War as a major tenet of its religion is Islam. Islam actually divides the world into The House of Submission and the House of War.
Christianity doesn't have it. Not anywhere in the New Testament. The Crusades where a response to Islamic Holy War. Christianity didn't have the concept until then. And, the Crusades started because the Byzantines requested Frankish aid to defend against the Muslims (and got much more than they bargained for).
Judaism may have religious war in the Mosaic books, but they haven't practiced religious war since they Assyrians (IIRC).
In fact, most major religions have that "Do not murder" thing (The King James Bible mis-translated the Hebrew as "Do not kill"). So, wars occur despite the moral constraints put in place by religion.
Yes, it is good that people can communicate as we move towards a one-world language. It breaks down a powerful barrier to understanding, as language is deeply intertwined with culture, history, and worldview.
So thats good, practically speaking.
Unfortunately, since language is so powerful in molding minds, we lose a lot when a language dies. We lose profound knowledge about a culture and the way it sees the world. To an anthropologist or linguist, this loss is irreplacable, which is why there are projects about whose goal is to record native languages before thier last speaker dies. Piecing together the natural history of humanity becomes that much harder when language dies.
Like everything else, you take the good with the bad.
My father spoke five languages - none of which I learned to speak more than a few mumbles here and there. But I could see how different languages were better at expressing different emotions, different ideas, different viewpoints in life. Some languages have such a strong system of honorifics and class in them - others are deviod of that, but have different terms spoken by the different sexes as a reflection of cultural differences. There are some with phonetic alphabets, others more pictoral, some with a blend of the two. The variety and beauty of human languages is every bit as beautiful as works of music, painting, sculpture.... Should we let the last man who knows how to build a piano die because there are enough other musical instruments out there?
Forget the structure of languages - what about all the ideas WRITTEN or SPOKEN in them that become forever inaccesable? How many of the Shakespeare's, Archemedes', Sun-Tzu's will be gone forever?
Should we apply the same concepts to computer languages? Data structures? 'Who cares, we have better stuff now, we'll never need to read that old stuff again.'
Language is a unique expression of humanity, and I think it is something worth preserving - even if it is not as practical as having Chinglish taking over the world.
Precisely. For most places in Europe, it's only two or three hours drive to another nation speaking another language. But from where I live, it's a full day's drive to Mexico, but who wants to go to Mexico? In the other direction it's two days drive to Canada, where they speak English. (At least four days to get to where they speak French).
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I am just stunned. I realize the majority of people here are probably monolingual and probably living in North America, but the majority of posts here seem to be along the lines of "Well it doesn't affect me, so who gives a f**k?" or "If they are dying out, they are just cruft". At least some people see the value in everyone having a common language - but thats the best argument for everyone to learn a SECOND language, not for us to just abandon all of the smaller languages out there.
You see, a lot of those languages are dying out because the speakers of the more monolithic languages have forced them into extinction. We have made speaking many Native American languages illegal in the past, abused the cultures and people involved and slowly strangled their native language speaking populations to the point where they have all died off or are doing so daily. We have marginalized many small linguistic groups by the overwhelming power of Western culture and advertising, by refusing to learn their languages and insisting they learn ours or suffer the consequences. Thats a tragedy, nothing less.
Each language is more than just a medium of communications between people, its the encapsulation of an entire way of thinking, of a cultural world-view. When a language dies out, a small piece of humanity and human achievement goes with it. We are all lessened by the death of each language, and with it each culture that dies out.
I would think the programmers here would be the first to get it: You can program some things in certain programming languages, express some concepts, much more effectively and efficiently than in others. You can do anything in any language certainly, but some lean one way or another, some are more expressive and some more rigidly defined. Luckily we rarely lose a programming language, they just go out of style for the majority of users, but as long as someone is willing to write a compiler, we can keep using one. That is not true of human languages. Once they are gone, they are gone completely, and with them a unique way of thinking, and a unique way of viewing the world and expressing ideas about it. Languages quite honestly give you a completely different way of thinking and its a shame to lose that.
New languages effectively don't happen, or at best rarely and I imagine its almost impossible for a new language to evolve in the modern day. Human linguistic evolution is essentially a living version of the Highlander maxim "there can be only one", or at best maybe 2. It doesn't have to be inevitable though, we can preserve dying languages, and with them the cultures they belong to. It just takes more effort than most people are willing to engage in, and sadly - like the majority of posters here - it doesn't seem to worry those who speak the major languages, particularly the world's piranha of a language English.
If you want to have some good insight into this issue, I would suggest reading this book: Spoken Here and perhaps: When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge The steady extinction of our world's languages is a human crisis in my opinion, and we all lose when another language dies, even if we don't realize it."The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Double plus ungood
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
A good, working knowledge of grammar is very important. I find it very difficult to read anything that is littered with blatant spelling and grammar errors. If you want to learn another language, you better understand your own. For example, unlike English, German has many indefinite articles that are not interchangeable. If you don't understand the difference between a subject, direct object, and an indirect object, good luck learning German well enough to be understood by native speakers of German.
By the way, you modified a verb with an adjective.
I realize that much, though certainly not all, of the Slashdot crowd is monolingual, and I do realize that there are great benefits to having a single lingua franca.
But as one who speaks 2 additional languages (Spanish and French) at an advanced conversational level and a third additional language (Arabic) at a very basic (and I mean very basic) level, I can't say I'm fond of this.
It's hard to understand if you haven't learned another language, but certain thoughts are more easily expressed in a foreign language once you've learned it. Certain phrases and words are simply idiomatic - they don't translate. "Che Pibe" is one that, for example, can kind of be explained in English, but loses its real meaning. I still want to say "trucho", a word without an adequate translation, when I see something that meets the characteristics. English contains a great deal of French words, true, but the real meaning, tied to cultural context, just can't be conveyed unless you are speaking in French. Arabic and, I imagine, Chinese are light years away from English.
I can accept a lingua franca, but language is an extremely important element of culture and expression. Most languages now dying were, arguably, dead long ago. But I shudder to think what would happen if the world adopted a "one language" stance rather than simply a lingua franca.
most immigrants learn english, and the vast majority of children of immigrants learn english, by the third generation it's uncommon to end up much more fluent in the grandparent's language than people who take it as a language requirement in HS/college.
when people are saying otherwise, they are probably lying to you in order to make you afraid of "zomg we is being invadered by teh mexecans"
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I'm OK with the linguists trying to mothball those old languages for the sake of knowledge and history.
But the priority for a universal understanding should be to teach new generations a logical language instead of trying to keep these alive.
http://www.transparency.org
I know you're just joking, but, just in case, consider this: how much manipulation is facilitated by the fact that those doing it can cherry-pick what they translate, and rely on a mass of sheep who don't know the other language and can't be arsed to check?
If someone in, say, America were to tell you that the Canadians as a whole are preaching holy Jihad upon the infidel Americans, everyone would just call him nuts. There are maybe millions of people who live close to the border or travel across the border, and can tell you relatively first hand what the Canadians actually say. Or if not, you can just order a newspaper and read for yourself what they do say. Even if they were to manage to find one nutcase preaching holy war, everyone would point out just that: it's just one idiot that noone else takes seriously.
Now try Americans vs Arabs, Arabs vs Jews, or whatever other manipulation across a language barrier. Now that works much better, doesn't it? You can cherry-pick which extremists (on both sides) to translate out of context, to make it sound like a whole language or ethnic group is hell-bent on wiping you off the face of the Earth. (Never mind that no group that size ever agreed on anything else, for as long as we have a recorded history.)
It goes sorta like this: Some fringe group on side A does a bit of fist shaking and maybe sabre rattling. Idiot politicians or journalists on side B take that out of context, maybe even mis-translate it a bit, present it as "Look what side A is saying about us!" Then some easily excitable nutcase on side B goes, basically, "yeah, well, I say nuke the idiots until they glow and let their god sort them!" Then idiot politicians or journalists on side A (or whoever has a vested interest in stirring up the pot) take _that_ out of context, maybe even take a pick of words when translating to sound even more ferocious, and present it as "Look what side B is saying about us!" Loop.
Sometimes even the subtle meaning of one word can be altered enough in translation to cause a big rift, although technically it is a honest-to-god translation.
E.g., a lot of the relatively early Christian problems leading schisms and heresies, a good thousand years before Hus and Luther, were... translation problems. Stuff that made sense about Christ in Greek, sounded like a major heresy when translated in Syriac, because the nuances of some words were different.
And that was guys who did a good faith effort to translate the scriptures and the dogmas decided in the church councils. Now imagine what you can do when you aren't that honest, and don't stop short of outright distorting the other side's words.
Or the even shorter version: if that quote was right, the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia should be the greatest enemies in history.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"a lot of those languages are dying out because the speakers of the more monolithic languages have forced them into extinction.": Sad, but unrelated to the issue at hand. This is consequence of oppression. There are several organizations that address that: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, ...
"Languages quite honestly give you a completely different way of thinking": Now there's a statement that requires a lot of backup. Language does not encapsulate ways of thinking; it's a means of conveying thoughts. Do you think that the Chinese cannot understand Plato? Their languages are about as far apart as possible.
"New languages effectively don't happen": well, there's a plainly wrong statement. New languages do arise. Not very frequently, but they do. Usually Creole, but there are more interesting cases. Check e.g. the sign language developed by deaf Nicaraguan children.
"the world's piranha of a language English": that's funny, but not really true either. Chinese is really gobbling up large portions of Asia and Spanish also seems to be spreading still.
I honestly think there is no way to stop the process of language extinction. It has always happened: my native tongue (Dutch) is quite different from what it used to be and that holds for many languages. They develop. Small groups tend to disappear. That also has always been the case. You can find remains of settlements everywhere with signs of a lost culture, and probably a lost language.
There is nothing inherently bad about that. It's not a question of ethics. Join Amnesty, support the Kurds and the Tibetans, but don't do it to save their language. Human life and thought is worth more than the precise way that they use to communicate.
That could be funny, but the language isn't evolved by a central authority, but by a lot of people. So it's constantly getting forked, making version numbers useless.
What?
A language is just a communication protocol. Would you say that having 7000 incompatible networking protocols is a good thing? No, it patently isn't. Thousands of incompatible languages simply help create pockets of ignorance and deprivation. The only people who benefit are those who can translate.
Having said that. The corollary is that learning multiple languages is a good idea for an individual. If you live in the UK and speak only English then you are excluded from the largest economies on the continent; France Germany etc. The French and Germans all speak English. If their economies tank, they can always look for work in the UK.
Speaking of which, I have a German lesson this evening.
Deleted
It is indeed funny, but you have reminded me that the USA was, for decades, the "great melting pot" of culture. We had immigrants from England, from Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and "imports" from Africa. And as crazy as it sounds, they all learned to speak what we now know as English. Even today, Americans can travel abroad and, by and large, still find people who speak English well enough to communicate without resorting to learning Farsi, Spanish, or some other language.
Good thing? Bad thing? I don't know. It's the way things are, at the moment, though it looks as though change is on the horizon. I surmise that within another 20 years or so, you may well find the rise of a new breed of American. One who speaks both English and Spanish. And to me, that is a good thing.
Of course it's going to be easier to communicate. But we'll lose a lot. Mostly, a lot of people will lose their way of thinking, having to conform to a language that does not fit into their thinking pattern.
When you look at a language and its composition, you'll notice that every language reflects its users and their culture. No, I'm not going for the 20 words for snow in Inuit. I'm going for the very, very finely tune nuances of reverence in Japanese, something that cannot even remotely be reproduced in any other language I know. And of course, that way you simply cannot understand the culture that is behind it. You can promote and punish a coworker with the use of a syllable.
How to translate it? Not at all. There is no way to translate it. There is not even a way to express it. Because explaining it or using "stronger" words (that would have to be used in English or other languages) would, you guessed it, already break the unwritten laws of etiquette. You're not supposed to really 'hear' it, you're supposed to know it from listening closely.
And I can only assume it's similar with other cultures and languages. Maybe (or most likely) in other areas, areas in everyday life that are more important than social status, but nontheless parts of their culture. This will most likely suffer from a lack of an own language that lends itself to the needs of the culture.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm not sure about the 'historical documents that will no longer be readable' comment..
People nowadays may not be able to read Latin as the Romans did, but it is still readable.
Also, many of the languages which will be lost probably have no written form, so there will be no 'documents' which cannot be translated. There may be stories/myths/histories which are known in the spoken form, which may be lost - but that is a coincidental loss due to the loss of a language, not a direct result - the stories could easily be kept in a different language, and could also be lost despite the language surviving, and should really be written down to avoid losing them - which isn't possible without some form of translation if there isn't a written form to the language.
As another thought - English is still a living language - but Chaucer's English isn't.. As one document I've read put it, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jefferson and Dubyu Bush all speak English; Shakespeare would probably have been able to converse with Chaucer and Jefferson (with some difficulty), but Jefferson (and certainly Bush) would need to have an interpreter to speak to Chaucer - even though it's the "same" language. So, does this mean that Chaucer's English is a dead language, or just a language that has evolved into something else?
If we say that it's a language which has evolved into something else, does this mean that other languages which 'die' by 'merging' have evolved or died out? If a language from the Andes becomes 'Spanish with some extra words' has it died out or evolved?
Strangely enough being able to reproduce (and actually doing it "in nature") is what defines a species, so the ability to interact is the scientific litmus test for relatedness in both of these cases.
That's a very simplistic species definition that falls down in a lot of cases. The best examples are organisms with asexual reproduction, which includes most of life on Earth. Also there are plenty of individual animals who for whatever reason can't reproduce at all. Anyway I'm not even sure what point I was trying to make there.
While you might be able to judge a person's abilities by how they talk or write it is just a measure of their usefulness to you. "More conformity == better" is just your personal bias for better or for worse.
It's not just about judging abilities. Its about judging attitude as well. When I see good English I think the author is probably smart, cares about the quality of what they do and is prepared to invest the time to get it right. When I see bad English I assume the author is either stupid, lazy, doesn't care, or is trying to make some kind of point. Bad English is also hard to read.
This is just horrible! We have to get the U.N. to start massive programs to preserve all these different languages. We can't let them become extinct. What will future generations do? We have to keep things as diverse as possible. This is worse than global warming. I wonder if Al Gore knows about this!
Why are so many people worried about languages dying off? In the long run this may solve some of the major problems we have in this world. If there were better communications between people we might not have so many misunderstandings that seem to be the cause of so many of the conflicts that are going on now. Just imagine the difference if most of the world spoke the same language? This is something that would bring everyone closer together on issues instead of dividing us.
We have to strive to reach common ground. But if this goes like most things there will be groups that will push to preserve all these languages. I can see it now, there will be walls erected around certain sections in each country where only the local dialect can be spoken under penalty of law. How else to preserve the spoken language but to isolate groups of people that speak that particular dialect?
The 2nd pony is probably Mandrin. China has a HUGE economy and with their one child policy they have a built in reduction over the next few decades which will leave the Chinese with say guess 500 million in population... about 2x the USA.
Only because of the vast population of China. It is incredibly difficult to learn a tonal language if you grow up speaking a non-tonal one. I don't see Chinese making any serious inroads in the West just for that reason alone. As someone who has studied several foreign languages, I can say I'd rather deal with grammar complexities than trying to figure out which tone is being used.
Meanwhile Europe and many parts of Asia are already speaking English. My guess is that English wins the race. It doesn't win because its best mind you.
No language is the best. English became a major world language in part because of the spread of the British Empire and in part because English grammar is pretty simple. Yes, much of the spelling makes no sense (well, there are reasons for it, but I'll skip the long explanation), but the grammar is basically easy. English is non-inflected, lacks grammatical genders, and the verbs have very simple conjugations. All of these make the language relatively easy to learn. Let's take Russian for an example now. It is inflected (6 cases), has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and almost all verbs come in pairs (perfective and imperfective). English got a big boost from the rise of American culture, but the relative simplicity of the grammar is why it became a world language. Mark Twain wrote a famous piece on his attempts to learn German and the insane grammar of the language where the word for "wife" in German is a masculine (!!!) word. Twain said that any reasonably intelligent person could come to grips with English a lot quicker than they could German just because the grammar of English is so much easier.
Well, unless you're proposing that rules cannot possibly ever change, I don't understand your gripe.
When I started learning English some 20 years ago, I was taught the "shall-will-will" future tense. However, my teacher told me back then that by the time I grew up, it would probably be "will-will-will". And guess what, she was right - I haven't noticed the "old" future tense being used much lately.
Another English teacher recently told me that one British author of foreign language teaching books predicts that the -s in 3rd person singular is also bound to disappear, probably in the next 20-50 years.
Language evolves.
Better yet, languages evolve. And though as a linguist I'm a bit saddened by language extinction, it is a normal process - some languages will die out, but eventually many more will develop, though most probably as jargons. It is an inevitable consequence of globalization, and can no longer be stopped.
Ignore this signature. By order.
When languages die out, it's because of an 'official language' that children must learn ( and learn in ) in school, and also use to interact with the government and other official entities. When children live in environments of multiple ethnicities with relatively similar levels of power, they learn many languages. When there is one dominant ethnicity and language, the members of which run the schools, government, businesses, and churches, children learn that dominant language ( and get ridiculed for speaking any of that silly country language ). The child quickly learns that speaking the dominant language means being successful, while speaking your mother tongue ( or grandmother's tongue ) means poverty and low social status ( i.e. being a 'dirty indian' or 'po white trash/black folk'). It's a matter of assimilation, not natural evolution.
Personally, I believe with projects like the OLPC, a global lingua franca will arise, or perhaps continentally regional lingua francas, for communications on the global communications network. However, people will continue to speak their native language at home. I have friends in Finland who are very conversant in 'digital english' -- written English over the internet. You would never guess they weren't English speaks from their online writings. More formal written English, not so good, and spoken English, sometimes pretty bad. However, they all continue to speak Finnish at home.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Well, for gods sake, please let them finally change it. The English writing system is the most retarded system in the whole world, where the way it's written doesn't even remotely resamble the way it's pronounced.
all other languages' spellings are being changed all the time, according to the changes that happen to the spoken language, so in most languages, you actually have a 1 to 1 mapping of letters to sounds, but with english you basically have to perform the whole 500 year evoltuion the language has gone through all the time, to transform the spelling that was close to phonetic 500 years ago, into the way we pronounce it today.
the biggest problem with english at the moment, is that there's nowhere to start. any change would be so dramatical that nobody would ever accept it for their normal writing, because it basically means that you have to learn to spell all over again. Anyone fancy writing in this way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundSpel
The mistake that bothers me the most is the misuse of 'of.' I see "could of," "would of," and "should of" so much. It doesn't even make sense.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!