most english spelling reforms are bad
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- Опубліковано 4 тра 2024
- a video about spelling reforms and why I think they're usually bad
/ hbmmaster
/ hbmmaster
/ janmisali
seximal.net/riform
lingthusiasm.com/post/1857357...
forms.gle/ZYsCEKLJEruipWZt7
Ever hear an accent you couldn't understand?
Now imagine you can't read it either
Can We Just Agree Absurdly Thick Irish Is It's Own Language?
I mean, irish literally is its own language
Conlang Critic not sure they’re talking about Irish Gaelic, I think they’re talking about an Irish accent
@@mccookies3664 it sounded like it
@@HBMmaster Yes, But I've Seen In Some Videos Where There Are Irish People Speaking, And I'm Pretty Sure It's Not Gaelic, But It's Also So Unintelligible They Need A Translator For It.
I came up with a spelling reform that only uses the letter 'e'.
People laugh at me for this, but to them I say eee e eeee, eeeeeee.
superscatboy eeee
That could actually work
Just use e and E to say stuff.
eEeEE EeeEeE eEe Ee eeeeE.
eEE eE E EeEe eeee / E eeee ee eee
this made me laugh more than it should have thank you for eeeeeeexisting
semeler te mene, bet et enle chenge the vewels
While writing an in-class essay, I forgot how to spell the word "of". I filled my margin with possible spellings: ove, uv, eove, trying to "sound it out". I rewrote the sentence and didn't look back. 20 years later I still remember being so confused by such a simple preposition.
Bruh
relatable
That reminds me of the time I once forgot my phone number and tried to look for it...
how in the balls
ev
English's unintuitive spelling acts like a built-in thesaurus, revealing the origin of different loanwords via their 'unintuitive' spellings.
do we relly a history book in our dictionary
@@raddiecat6528 yes, it's fun
Island doesn’t derive from isle, but from īland.
@@juandiegovalverde1982 One single spelling can't possibly cover all the steps from old saxon to modern english
Honestly, as a non-native speaker I find this fascinating and frustrating at the same time.
On one hand, it's interesting because it's kinda like a language fossil record, and if you dig enough you'll discover a lot about the history of the language and how the it evolved up to how it is today.
On the other hand, trying to read and interpret written words or spell words you only know the spoken form is an absolute nightmare. Having a couple words that are spelled differently but pronounced the same or pronounced the same but spelled differently is something, but English completely abuses the use of this feature by using it in every other word, verb tensing or to create a difference between subject vs verb; and it becomes extremely annoying.
"There isnt an organisation regulating the English language"
*cries in french*
Yeah, but as far as normal conversation and unofficial texts are concerned, the French people aren't too concerned with L'Académie française, right?
*laughs in Russian*
@@Sovairu Depends who you hang with, it can be a big deal. Lots of people were angry with "nénufar" for instance, but it suddenly became acceptable spelling officially (though I personally don't accept it)
@@Sovairu Oh how innocent you are. People correct each other all the time, even when *speaking*, it's ridiculous.
"You shouldn't be using that English word"
"You should say it this way and not that way"
"You should do the agreement here."
"Did you just say "chevals" instead of "chevaux"? Uuuuuggggh never do that again in front of me."
But it gets even worse. In 1990, there was a proposed spelling reform, and as far as I know, L'Académie française wasn't against it. But prescriptivism and language elitism are so deeply rooted in the community, lots of people reject this reform (which is pretty tame and totally makes sense, by the way), saying things like "we're leveling the language down", "people are gonna get dumber if they start learning it that way" and so on...
No joke, to the French-speaking community, the French language is sacred and must not be touched under any circumstance.
@@guy_th18 Why don't you accept "nénufar", if I may ask?
THANK YOU for acknowledging that ghoti is and has been a terrible example to use to criticize English orthography.
Phich
Does this work
@@devonoknabo2582 I would read that as "fich" before "fish"
@@kekaci ch makes sh sound in
CliCHe
@@devonoknabo2582 I'd say maybe "phiche" in that case. Which could be read with a long /i/ sound, but I think could also be read with the short sound as well.
@@sungalaxia let's just yeuse di fun rîform end publish âl thî büks in it
The best way to spell “small” is “smol”, “lol” is both an interjection and punctuation, “/s” is punctuation, and emojis and emoticons are valid hieroglyphs with real grammatical meaning as either punctuation, tone indicators, or fully functional morphemes.
Honestly, thanks to the internet, more significant and better changes are happening to English than just spelling reform.
IDK, I think "smol" has different contexts than "small". "Small" simply means something is diminutive, while "smol" also tends to imply cuteness. Kinda like how "thicc" isn't really so much an alternate way to spell "thick" as it is a new homophone that means curvaceous.
As for emojis, they're a double-edged sword. Peppered in, they can work just fine, but when someone puts them all over the sentence or leaves a massive trail of them at the end (usually the one Discord calls :joy:), that's kinda cringe. Kinda gives off hunbot vibes.
Wait you actually pronounce smol the same as small? The point of its charm is it's a silly alteration which to me included the pronunciation
@@IlSharmouta Well… sorta. It feels less like a change in pronunciation and more a like change in the voice I use to pronounce it. Small is in a normal voice, smol is in a cutesy voice.
Honestly I think Tumblr has been the biggest source of change to the English language we've seen since the spread of AAVE, no joke.
Continuing from the examples you gave, another one I like is how capitalization and punctuation can indicate tone (and not just in the classic "I'M SCREAMING AT YOU!!!" way). Internet users know that "OMG, I seriously love this!!" is expressing a slightly different sentiment than "omg i seriously love this" despite using the exact same words.
Another one I like a lot is when words switch to all caps after the first couple letters. Like, "i just fuCKING SPILLED PEPSI ON MY KEYBOARD" does a fantastic job of indicating a surprised, hysterical reaction.
One final example is something I just noticed I've been doing naturally while writing this: using very short paragraphs. If this were a formal paper or something, all of what I've said so far would be one paragraph. Not on the internet though. Unlike the others, I think this one probably didn't originate/first become popular on Tumblr (message boards like AOL and 4chan seem more likely).
I could go on and on but I won't. If anyone's interested, there's a Tumblr blog called Tumblinguistics that revolves around this kind of thing. I would link it but I don't want YT marking my comment as spam so... yeah go find it yourself.
@@peanutbuttercracker1 I have doubts about any of those originating on tumblr. I know that most of those written tonal implications predate tumblr by quite a few years. Heck, some of them predate AIM and started in IRC or email lists.
I would give the credit to the internet as a whole, because regardless of where it is first used, it gets popularized pretty much everywhere depending on the culture of each section of the internet. Certainly tumblr was a part of it, but tumblr is only a very tiny corner of the internet with very little external influence apart from the great migration to twitter.
Regardless, the incredible changes and additions to written grammar and tone through the internet has been astounding to watch.
For some reason, watching this made me think about my own native tongue, Finnish. We have a mostly consistent way to spell words, namely, it's phonetically consistent. Mostly because the one letter that can change based on context is C, at least that I can think of. Even so it's usually only used in proper names like Cecilia. Any word borrowed from another language that would have C has it replaced with either a K or an S, depending on context.
Oh, an on dialects, Finnish has a "Kirjakieli" which is the official, "proper" way to spell stuff. Schools teach this and expect you to submit essays with these correct spellings. But in a casual text or over the internet you'll find a lot of people just phonetically writing out however they speak normally. The word for me, for example, is "Minä" in kirjakieli, but any local dialect can turn it to "mä", "mää" or "mie". Possibly more variations that I just can't think of at the moment. (Also side note, Finnish grammar is pretty loose. It's possible to switch the places of two words in a sentence and end up with the same meaning. In English doing the same, sounding like Yoda you'd end up)
...no I don't know why I rambled on about Finnish on a video about English spelling reforms. I'm not even a language expert of any sort haha.
Finnish and Turkish have a lot of language similarities for interesting reasons that are beyond the scope of this comment and my understanding. I love that their direct translations to English sound like Yoda speak. English speakers who attempt to learn this kind of grammar, especially with agglutination, usually tear their hair out.
I'm currently learning Finnish, and this was pretty cool. Kiitos!
This was a great read, thanks!
There are more exceptions. "Kenkä" (shoe) is pronounced as "keŋkä", "kengät" (shoes) as "keŋŋät", "englanti" (English) as "eŋlanti", "vauva" (baby) as "vauvva", "tervetuloa" (welcome) as "tervettuloa" and so on.
So from what I understand, Finnish is a harder to break language than English, but still has its limits.
Jan Misal: "warm cloak"
Me: "worm clock"
That makes so much more sense now I was so confused why he was wearing a clock
Worm clok
I was confused for a second but since there is context provided it was pretty easy to know it was a warm cloak.
Ooooooh!! The context had me insert "cloth," and I was like, "How is that intuitive though...?"
lmfao
No more conlang critic, Lang critic now
Hello, welcome to Lang Critic my name is paul *dog barks*
Today, I will be reviewing Georgian.
...
All in all I think I like Georgian more than I like Ithquil but less than Drsk.
I can see it now...
"Hebrew has a masculine-feminine gender system. That's sexist and bad!"
@@MalachiCo0 Wait till he reviews those aboriginal languages which put women, tools and inanimate object in the same noun class.
@@abyssalboy8811 by god his rage from that is gonna give him an aneurysm
Hiccough has never a correct spelling. It originated from a misunderstanding by the laymen that a hiccup was related to a cough. The word hiccup actually predates hiccough.
makes sense. "hiccup" is onomatopoeic, although i believe "cough" is too
I was totally confused until i read this comment, i think i allways said it as hippus
While I mostly agree from a practical standpoint, simply saying "This spelling is wrong" doesn't make it less recognized as a legitimate spelling. The silent K didn't used to be silent, and arose from people assuming it was, yet we don't say "the correct pronunciation of knight is kuh-nite".
@@Naokarma Language does evolve based on changes in use. Spellings and pronunciations change with time and that's fine. Your example of the word "Knight" is a good representation of this.
However, "hiccup" is still widely used in British English with "hiccough" being seen as an 'alternative' spelling purely due to its usage. If "hiccup" was no longer used in modern British English then I'd agree that "hiccough" is the correct spelling. But that isn't the case.
Not all uses of language are correct, regardless of their prevalence. Look at how many people incorrectly use "of" instead of "have". Or the many people that confuse the words "envious" and "jealous".
A line needs to be drawn somewhere for what constitutes correct English while still allowing for natural evolution of language.
One obvious example is when young children get words wrong as they're learning to speak. Or when they assume the past tense of "run" is "runed" because they think to make something past tense you simply add -ed to the end of a word. I don't think anyone would say that these are correct uses of English, even though it's still possible to understand the meaning of what's being said.
Languages need rules in order to prevent issues with miscommunication, and standardising things is one way of doing that. Modern language evolution is much more about creating new words and adding slang definitions of existing words then it is about changing spellings etc.. And that's because now we have the ability to have easily accessible standardised rules for our languages.
@@sumandark8600 I completely agree with your sentiment. I just felt that it was worth highlighting that line to be drawn.
I suggest using a reform I made called the "e" reform: add an "e" to the end of every word (double the final consonant if it directly follows a vowel). Sure, it doesn't "fix" English spelling, but it's easy to use and at least it adds some consistency.
Heree isse anne examplee offe ae peicee offe texte writtenne inne thee "ee" reforme. Youe canne seee thatte it'se verye easye toe usee.
geniusse
Trulyee ae greatte reforme. Myye spellinge ise muchhe moree elegante.
@@Periwinkleaccount
Thisse isse thee moste decadente balle I’vee everre beenne toe.
The only thing this accomplished is making me read things in a french accent
@@shadidmosharraf3033 lee frenchhe accentte intensifiesse simplye bye addingge 'ee' toe itte. Wee shouldde allle doe thisse withhe frenchhe nextte.
5:00 Well, as a French I don't see the issue. Just convince everyone that dialects are barbaric, and that everyone not using the "proper" way is a total idiot, a lesser human being. It worked perfectly fine for us!
(Yes, that is sarcasm)
I fully agree with your sarcastic statement.
It sound just like a high society person from the Republic of Rome would say about latin.
America's already like that, except every state thinks they're the only ones speaking proper English.
@@RobertJones-bs9pf lmao true
Go back to Frankish Germanic, froggy! (Reciprocal Sarcasm)
jan misali is one of the only people I can imagine arguing that we should apply basic anarchist theory to English orthography reform and that's why I keep coming back for each new video.
He EXUDES chaotic energy.
@@carlavlund5841 chaos≠anarchist
I've made this argument so many times when explaining Anarchism to family and friends, especially bilingual people who speak a language that is governed by an academy. It's a really useful tool to help people understand.
No gods, no masters, no dictionaries.
@@Painocus I mean, maybe descriptive dictionaries?
The speakers can have a little dictionary, as a treat.
1:11 Tsunami, being a loan word, is a bad example because the t is actually pronounced. Tsu and su are two different characters in japanese and make a slightly different sound.
But English generally doesn’t have or allow /ts/ at the start of a syllable, so the majority of speakers simplify that cluster to /s/. And L1 Anglophones usually aren’t aware of or care much for where a word came from when they are speaking.
More recent loanwords keep their direct spelling/romanization, but they will eventually be more finely localized. A loanword from Japan that has since been anglicized is “rickshaw” from “rikisha.”
I've started pronouncing Tsunami with both sounds recently, less because of Japanese and more because my hometown on the opposite side of the ocean starts with the same sound. Officially it tends to be pronounced with only the 's,' but those of us from here usually pronounce just the 't' instead. It's part of why "Sunami" seemed vaguely weird from my perspective.
I am disappointed the “soon with double u” part didn’t have a gag with soon spelt as “swn” in the corner or something
“As we all know, the great vowel shift...”
me, who has no idea what all these funky letters are: yes of course, I know the one
The Great Vowel Shift was when all the short and long vowel sounds (via magic E, etc) stopped matching up. The long vowels were originally just longer versions of the short vowels.
it's when we decided spelling things how they sound, and sounding things how they're spelled, is a bad idea, I guess
It's basically when all long vowels started to be pronounced as diphthongs. So for example, "kite" would've been pronounced something like "keet" before GVS but "kait" after it.
I like your funny vowels, magic man.
It's when all the long vowels of Middle English were raised and later dipthongised
Next tīm the tēcher tells mē to spell things the “rīght” wāy, I’m just gōing t’tell them that spelling is arbutrāry.
Ai leik the wei hu aer thinking
Ainferchwhilch folk hæst a different weiȝ of writiŋ ænd spreakiŋ, ænd ðere ist no set of spelliŋs of all ðe wœrds in Eŋlish ðæt'st accepted ænd nytted by all native spreakers, so ðere realliche ist no ‘richt’ spelliŋ in Eŋlish!
qěg, qaj qæbsělutˀli HEJTˀ makŕonx bijiŋ juzd fr̄ dıpˀþáŋcz.
What dœs Q represent in your orþografy?
Yah! She wihl juhst hahf tu del wihtt iht.
I'm not a native English speaker, and of course at the time when I was only learning English, the irregularities in spelling weren't very pleasant. But now I feel like it works just fine: first, it manages to only use 26 standard Latin letters without any diacritics, which is good for, say, encoding. Despite huge volume of exceptions, there still are rules that feel absolutely natural once you are at a certain level of proficiency. And I appreciate that the words keep their etymology, so that we can interconnect with the history of the language
Wél, ai faind dhis tú bí e wík argiúment sins if yúer kiúríes ebaut dhe étemólejí óv e wurd, yú kan just surc dhe wurd up ónlain. And méní spélingz ar inkerékt in rigard tú dhéer étimólejí éníwéí diú tú hau dhe pípel hú standerdaizd dhe spéling óv dhe Inglish langwij (óv hwic dhéer wur méní diferent grúps with spéling normz inspaierd bai dhéer langwijez, hwic iz wun óv dhe rízenz whai Inglish haz sou méní wéiz tú spél dhe séim saundz) méid sum mistéiks and thot dhat sum wurdz wur riléited dhat ríelí wurent, and sum wur updéited tú luuk similer tú udher wurdz (laik hau "delight" néver had dhe "gh" saund in it dhat yúst tú bí prenaunst, it wóz just spéld dhat wéi tú luuk similer tú "light", hwic bai dhat taim if ai rikol keréktlí, dhe "gh" saund /ç/ wóz nou lónger prenaunst. And sum wurdz laik "thumb" had e "b" aded tú méik dhém similer in epírens tú "dumb", íven dhou dhe former néver had e "b"-saund.
Well, I find this to be a weak argument since if you're curious about the etymology of a word, you can just search the word up online. And many spellings are incorrect in regard to their etymology anyway do to how the people who standardised the spelling of the English language (of which there were many different groups with spelling norms inspired by their languages, which is one of the reasons why English has so many ways to spell the same sounds) made some mistakes and thought that some words were related that really werent, and some were updated to look similar to other words (like how "delight" never had the "gh" sound in it that used to be pronounced, it was spelled that way to look similar to "light", which by that time if I recall correctly, the "gh" sound /ç/ was no longer pronounced. And some words like "thum" had a "b" added to make them similar in appearance to "dumb", even though the former never had a "b" sound.
@@emmonax7614I read the reformed spelling slowly and with great effort just to discover the normal text below it?😭😭
To go along with “Pfysche” as an alternate fish, I would like to introduce my new word:
*“Khaughrdt”*
It shall replace the word “Cart” forever.
“Kh” is a common sound equal to a hard “K” or “Ch”
“Augh” makes the “ô” sound, which sounds the same as the word “Awe.” This sound is the same in “Cart” as in “Slaughter.”
If it trips you out too much, or if you think that the “R” in “Cart” changes the sound of the “ô” to be different, imagine comparing “Slaughterize,” with “Cauterize” for the starting “ô” sound (you will find them identical in sound), and then compare “Cauterize” to “Cart” in the starting “ô” sound, which you will find is identical again, meaning that the “ô” sound in “Cart” is made the same as the “ô” sound in “Slaughter,” justifying the use of “augh” as the “ô” (pronounced as “Awe”) sound.
And finally, the “Rdt” ending is common in German words spelt in English. “Reinhardt” is an easy example, and for comparison, in “Reinhardt,” “Hardt” is pronounced identical to “Heart,” and “Heart” rhymes perfectly with “Cart.”
This is my overly detailed explanation of why I hence forth will be using the word “Khaughrdt” to replace the word “Cart.”
And to use it in a sentence for the first time: “The large khaughrdt of hay rolled down the bumpy road.”
Also, this leaves much potential for more words to be screwed around with, such as “Carton,” “Cartridge,” “Cartwheel,” and more.
Consider this: Charghtte. Ch from chlorine, argh from y’know argh, tte from rosette.
Cart doesn't have an "aw" sound, it has an ah sound, like father and box. Cart with an aw sound would be court.
thanks, I hate it
Phaughrdt 💨
Khôrdt
I always hated when my teachers would say “just sound it out”
ah yes, wens-dey. what do you mean there's an "ednes" in the middle??
had a fun time with that one, thanks teach :')
Even worse, it’s doubly confusing because no one will ever no except by chance that Wednesday is a reference to Odin/Woden. At least Thursday can be misspelt to realize it’s a reference to Thor and Saturday is one letter off from Saturn
If I could relive elementary school with my current brain, I'd write an entire essay spelled phonetically according to my dialect of English
@@qwxzy1265 Im so happy that my mom’s first language is Spanish cause I never has trouble with this cause she’d always say “Wed-nes-day”
Me too! I knew how to read, and I knew principal was not pronounced Prin-ki-pal, but having my teacher insist I read it that way infuriated me.
this video has taught me a lot. despite your advice, i will be starting my own english spelling reform, where the only change is "a cappella" to "acapella". thank you
oh my god yes... acapella lovers rise. i legit thought it was acapella for so long
Would you also turn et cetera into etcetera
absolutely. i'm no monster
@@Donut-Eater I'd personally despise that.
@@mayhair ok, make it eccetera
The tricky thing about English is the fact that all vowels can reduce to schwa, and there are multiple ways of pronouncing a word based on context.
Not all vowels can reduce to schwa, especially when words are pronounced in isolation instead of in a sentence. And as for context, I can think of "contrast" as a noun and "contrast" as a verb (kóntrast/kentrast)*; and "the" before consonants and "the" before vowels (dhe benane/dhí apel)
*represented in my system.
Fantastic video! Great work! This is a very difficult subject to deal with, as many people get worked up about it. I think that we should allow multiple spellings of words globally, but that we should have an academic set of spellings. Again with such a dynamic problem you did a great job discussing and sharing your opinions on it.
"What if we spelled 'people' like this: peepole. that would be funny i think." -Kim Kardashian
peepoopl
should be pipou.
Widepeepolehappy
poipole
amen
im sorry who was just smoking crack thinking “hmm lets change the spelling of the word ‘the’ to ‘dhiy’”
Dhiy ghoti
Well I could see how because there are two different pronunciations of the word "the" which are: /ðə/ if the following word starts with a consonant and /ði/ if it starts with a vowel. Consider "the fish" vs "the apple". I didn't notice this until one of my German host sisters pointed this out to me. I guess it's just another thing us natives do automatically without thinking about it.
@@samneibauer4241 I've been thinking about this for so long, and I've tried to understand why we use it interchangeably. Has there been a study conducted on this anywhere/do you know why it happens?
@@kekaci 90% sure it's based on the stress pattern of the following word, more than anything (remember English has variable stress, and arguably 3 or 4 degrees of stress, depending how you analyse it.)
As for the dh, That part makes sense, it's indicating the use of the voiced sound rather than the unvoiced sound. (Which only actually Matters when it might be other wise ambiguous whether you intended thigh or thy, as they're the only pair of English words where voiced or unvoiced th is the only distinction between the two).
Respelling English vowels is always a disaster of incompatible dialects (and definitions!) though. I'm fairly sure you'd have to add several additional characters just to produce something Reasonable, nevermind Good.
@@laurencefraser I see your thigh/thy and raise you one either/ether (only in some speakers).
The reason any English spelling reform struggles to make sense is that we forget that many words are taken from other languages and then pronounced completely different while keeping the same spelling.
That's why I love Spanish. We have a relative easy spelling (with some quirks), but even if you don't do it right, it's understandable (like güevos for huevos, or baca for vaca). We could improve it, but it's better (in the spelling issue) than English.
"tony"
"toughneigh"
Toughkneigh
Ptoughneigh *
Ptoughgneigh
Ptoughkneghtr
Spelling in Irish be like that haha
Honestly I'd watch a full Conlang critic Film in theatre just for the meme of it just bein the same white text on black with no extra effects
I have taken Spanish before and one of the observations that stood out is how consistent Spanish orthography is.
Great job. Luv the vid 👍 and the part about ‘nonstandard’ spelling at the end, awesome. Alternative spellings like ‘tho’ and ‘gotta’ are just language evolving and changing; spelling reforms spontaneously brought about through people’s general use.
"...but that doesn't meaan it's a *bad* spelling."
*cries in English as a second language
Sorry about that. I do German, and it's much easier to spell.
The idea of a spelling contest literally doesn't exist on other languages. English spelling is nuts!
@@IgnacioLosiggio exactly. A Turk-Cypriot I know was making fun of English for that reason.
"...but that doesn't mean it's a bad spelling." only English speaker would say so.
@@adapienkowska2605 I am a English, thoroughbred, and I make about as many spelling mistakes in German as English - not counting ones where I get the word wrong completely, of course.
I definitely say “y’ever” more than “have you ever”, and I'm gonna start writin' it that way, y’all.
Southern needs its own damn orthography.
Language is fluid and y'all is so efficient and pleasant that even northerners are adopting it (source: I'm Canadian)
FinetalPies yeah I’m from New York and I use y’all all the time
I'd've gone to the store, but there wasn't enough gas in th' car, so I drove to thuh gas station first, and as I'm standin' there, fishin' in my pocket for my debit card, this big gust of wind blows my hat clean off!
While this's happening. . .
@@FinetalPies fellow Canadian who also uses y'all, we just really needed a word for the second person plural and y'all sounds so good
I spent time in Korea and I really envy their language system. It's very precise, because one person sat down and invented the whole system. Whereas I grew up in the south, and when I went full Hawkins County with my accent, native speaker could not understand me. So I think that allowing people to spell things how it makes sense to them would only widen the gap in English dialects. As it stands, my parents were from Ohio, and I went to school in the south. So when it comes to English I'm just confused all the time.
After learning some Spanish in Highschool i always suspected that a big part of the "bad grammar" of the Southern Dialect was a result of Spanish influence from Florida and Mexico. (Y'all is a whole verb conjugation and even has a "formal" varient, double negatives just reinforce the negative, and some syntax gets flipped)
Of course other aspects like "talking slowly" or apparently heavy use of new contractions are probably just natively added to the dialect and not loaned from spanish.
I'm not a linguist so this is just a theory but English has a propensity for word theft from other languages. (Partially because its a descriptive language not a prescriptive one so their is now "Academy of the English Language" to declare what is or isn't correct, in contrast to French which is a prescriptive language with the "Académie Fraçaise" to regulate the language)
I think Southern accents also have a lot of Scottish and maybe some Irish influence@@jasonreed7522
The problem with spelling reforms is that they will eventually be outdated and you will need another spelling reform
That's the point of spelling reforms, Einstein
Yes????
Bruh that's like saying you shouldn't clean up your house, because it's going to get dirty again.
If you are consistant in avoiding things that will become obsolete, how did you post his comment? Computers and phones quickly become outdated, even before that you have to update your software or even complete OS. And the language will eventually change to a new one, like latin to Romance languages. Not updating a language doesnt future-proof it anymore than not updating computer software future proofs a computer
Not if you pick rules that everybody can follow
Btw, English orthography isn't "badly designed". It's just 500 years out of date. It's very common for languages to change over time with spelling not keeping up with the change. Then eventually the language either has a reform or ends up with a total nonsense orthography like Tibetan.
Hey Tibetan got a reform! ...800 years ago...
@@dizzydaisy909 It wasn't even 800 years ago but rather in the year 800. (I'm assuming this isn't the exact year but I'm not entirely sure.)
Beautiful writing system though!
@@the-human-being Spelling can still be changed tho
It wasn't "badly designed." It wasn't _designed at all._ It evolved pretty naturally.
Me, a conlanger:
The Algorithm: here's a youtuber who made a funny video about how hangman is a weird game.
Me: neat, I'll subscribe.
That youtuber's video history: conlang conlang conlang.
Me: huh.
So you're a conlanger? Name every conlang. /s
@@leysont OK, I'll nickname Every Conlang "/s".
I've been around this channel for too long, my brain skipped over the "al" there and read out "The Gorithm"
@@anonymoususer9303 If you can continue, doesn't that mean you've failed?
Plus I just made one up, you can't know what it's called.
@@anonymoususer9303 How could you forget about Oqolaawak, Nekachti, Edun and Ilothwii?
Found you via the Imperical video, following you because of this and that one.
Thank you for providing this source of scratches for when my brains gets itchy.
I’ve been subscribed to this channel for a while but I guess I forgot to start exploring it after I subscribed. New favorite channel right now
“The Perfect Language (Epic)” is probably my favorite running joke on this channel
“Ghoti” is fish in Klingon which is a fine joke. Also the word “guarantee” can get stuffed.
But the real question is why do the Klingons have a word for a class of vertebrates native to Earth?
What's wrong with the word "guarantee"?
@@blinkingberry9591 With my accent it sounds like "garuntee" so figuring out where the "u" goes is horrible every time.
@@sammin101 Yep, every time
@@thegreatbutterfly There is no scientifically recognized class known as "fish".
i never thought about spelling reform in the way you put at the end
the idea that caring about the 'right' spelling is what holds us back from taking on words that are simpler and more intuitive in their spelling honestly never occured to me, but in retrospect i think its something i realized a good time ago without noticing
I think one of the greatest benefits of modern English over many different reforms is the noticeable lack of accents. It's a purely intuitive and experience based language, one that works best when each letter is distinct enough to not be easily mistaken. You can read it at a glance and very rarely will it be unclear what a particular letter is if using a standard typeface. It would be easy to mistake ì and i at a glance, it would be easy to confuse ì and í if you don't already know, it would be easy to mistake ß and B if not in a standard typeface.
The truth is, modern English works more than we give it credit for. Reading the exerpt of The North Wind and the Sun you used in the video I regularly made mistakes when trying to read it intuitively as opposed to just knowing the words. But with English, while yes it's still possible to make mistakes, those mistakes are much less frequent, even if you don't speak English, because many countries use the latin alphabet as, at the very least, a secondary script.
"Aesthetically pleasing" is largely due to our existing knowledge or rather experience with current English.
Exactly, it's a measure of how close it looks to current English orthography.
@@super55555mario and it depends on your aesthetic standards, i guess. to me and many other non-natives English orthography looks awful.
Михаил К Sure, but if you’re rewriting someone else’s language with the intent of replacing it them liking how it looks it more important than you liking how it looks.
I thought some of the supposedly non-pleasing orthographies looked fine, TBH.
@@jan_kisan wel, yu kant spel ingglish lyk dis. ryting it wid di ekstra leters is far beter
olso, di speling wud den vary from aksent tu aksent
“Nobody likes learning a new alphabet”
Me, who’s favourite part of learning a language is having a different alphabet: What am I, a roach?
I'm Spanish and I learn Chinese which doesn't even have an alphabet at all.
*whose
@@chrisrj9871 *huu'z
âr jeu âl dum hęv yuu evë spelt "huu'z"?
Well, considering that your name is nobody, he’s not wrong
I think making a major spelling reform these days could be more possible than you think.
Portuguese, for example, managed to go through a somewhat major reform in 1910 (I believe), no much more than just a century ago. And even then, initially, that was adopted only in Portugal; in Brazil, we would only have our own reform in the mid-1930s. It's a pretty recent reform and there weren't any real adoption issues.
This reform basically drops the more etymological spellings from Latin in favor of more simplified, more phonetic and more regular spellings. So _sciência_ , _pharmácia_ , _philosophya_ , and _theatro_ (respectively: science, pharmacy, philosophy, and theater) became _ciência_ , _farmácia_ _filosofia_ , and _teatro_ . The trick there was dropping completely only the soundless letters and only making replacements that would make the new words still sound the same in the old orthography, so that any Portuguese speaker could read the new spelling without even knowing about the spelling reform. This might sound like not a lot to change, but I say "major" because of the _extent_ of the changes: a _lot_ of the vocabulary was affected by the reform (so much so that it's super hard to read documents from the early 20th century, which still use the old spelling).
Now of course Portuguese has some advantages when compared to English: it has much less speakers, (even less so in 1935), and up until very recently had two different standard orthographies: Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese. However, 50 million people, which is the total number of Portuguese speakers in the 1930s, while less than the ~400 million native English speakers today and _much_ less than ~1 billion speakers overall, is nothing to scoff at.
And, about the second point, maybe having multiple spelling standards isn't really that bad and trying to "solve" that problem brings more problems than it solves, like some of the problems you mentioned? Portuguese had a very recent spelling reform, created in 1990, but only fully implemented in 2016. It tried to solve the fragmentation "problem" Portuguese had, but the solution ended up being kind of a mess that made nobody happy. Many spelling rules were changed in both sides of the Atlantic just to conform to the other spelling, but the worst of all is that now we have multiple valid spelling of many different words for no reason other than to accommodate the usual Brazilian and Portuguese spellings: fact can be _fato_ (🇧🇷) or _facto_ (🇵🇹); adoption can be _adoção_ (🇧🇷) or _adopção_ (🇵🇹); etc. Before the reform, _adoção_ was invalid EP and _adopção_ was invalid BP; now, both spellings are valid everywhere (even though, in practice, their use remains the same). I think this reform was completely unjustified (there's very little real interaction between Brazilians and the Portuguese to justify an unification), but unfortunately the damage is done.
So I really don't think it is unreasonable to strive for an US English spelling reform, for example. A broad simplification of orthography, in a similar vein of what happened in Portuguese, tailored to the needs of US-American speakers could really make it easier to read and write correct normative English for the general public. A major dealbreaker here is English's status of _lingua franca_, which could disincentivize a local-only spelling reform (who wants to be the oddball with different spelling rules than the rest of the planet?), but maybe that won't be a big problem if the different spelling standards don't deviate too much from each other.
Anyway, just a thought. Sorry for bringing this up in a 2-year-old video, but I had to get it out of my head.
(Edited because UA-cam's comment system keeps crapping its pants when I try to emphasize words near punctuation).
The end was a bit peachy but nice video overall and nice reform you came up with! A downside of not all spelling the same way is that both auto-correct for actual tpyos and word prediction become way harder to do..
"Versatile enough to handle any dialect"
*Laughs in Irish Dialects*
My dude if I drive 30 miles west from where I'm sitting now, (From Cork to Kerry) the people there will be speaking so incomprehensibly that it has, in the past, caused issues when the national news has to report on the region.
Please make a video in the style of Tom Scott about that.
I wish the Irish language would adopt parts of its Middle Irish script. It’s so hard to pronounce some words because it’s hard to determine if a vowel is pronounced or if it informs whether a consonant is broad or slender. The issue is that those characters aren’t in the ASCII code and are also hard to learn for some.
Claims to be Irish and yet uses “miles”
@@Riolu1209 would you further explain this comment? Based on stereotypes and nothing but weird UK shows and documentaries, I'd guess that the "less British" areas of UK would use SI units less than "more British" areas
@@zweks well, if you want me to further explain, my statement, "It was a joke" anyone from anywhere can use alternative measurements of units especially if it's to convey to a certain party. Nothing serious
To be frank I think as an American we should abandon our current measurement system and switch to Metric, like everyone else for convenience.
Yeah, "phlegm" is not bad at all, you just have to have all allowed consonant clusters of English ready in your mind :D
indict
*Edit*: The end of the video has made the comment below obsolete. However, I'd still like to hear your thoughts (or "thorts"?) on that :D
I don't see the argument behind choosing dialects being necessarily bad. Why shouldn't it be a good decision to make spelling close to how most people speak a language and how native speakers pronounce standard variants. Or at least one can design the orthography such that words are spelled always in accordance with how at least a few native speakers pronounce stuff. NO ONE says "though" the way it's spelled (neither "ðaux" nor "ðoʊg").
Spelling reforms can also be made by institutions. In German for example there have been a series of spelling reforms every couple of decades until now. Swiss German doesn't have a standard spelling from what I've heard.
Not consciously you don't--a speaker who is fluent in English and has grammatical competence in it will know that /gm/ as a consonant cluster in that position is in some way wrong, even if they can't articulate why.
Lalo The thing with choosing one accent though is that there isn’t one “standard english-speaking accent” that all native speakers have and non-native speakers don’t. There isn’t even a majority accent. So, if you choose to represent the CAUGHT vowel the same as the COT vowel, then people who don’t speak with the cot-caught merger will be forced to choose how the word they are reading should be pronounced (does the letter o hear mean /ɑ/ or /ɔ/ or /ɒ/?). Conversely, representing those vowels all with different letters would mean people who speak with the mergers would have to memorize unintuitive spellings.
I've Noticed Lots Of Consonant Clusters In English That Other PeopleDon't Seem To Pronounce, Yet I Do, Like In My Dialect The 'T' In 'Tsunami', Or The 'M' In 'Mnemonic', Isn't Silent. In Some Of These Cases I Didn't Even Know It Was Regular To Have Said Letter Silent.
I loved reading the fun riform. I found it surprisingly intuitive with the exception of like one word. I also noticed that as sood as I started reading it I changed the way I spoke but in a way that is likely better than how I normally talk anyway. was super cool. I would love to see it become more popular.
Interesting video! As someone who's dyslexia affects their spelling I still sound out words I have trouble with to this day. It's interesting to see a reform for english that lines up to how I would typically spell something
“There is only one way to spell each word.” Well the US and UK are pretty OK with how they both spell color/colour and similar words. (Though they’ll fight to the death over what “biscuit” means). And I’m not sure anyone pays attention to grey/gray unless you spell it græy.
The "biscuit" is either a cookie or a hunk of bread, doesn't matter to me (because I like both).
Then you got a word like "highway", which has so many uses.
US usage: a higher speed road, usually multilaned, connecting cities; can feature intersections.
UK usage: any road meant for motorvehicles, regardless of speed and usage.
EU usage: roads of the category motorway, where the two directions have a physical divider, and there are no intersections.
People use this word so haphazardly, it's bad.
@@Liggliluff freeway. The ones in the UK are called Motorways. If the speed is different by lane, it’s a motorway, if not, a freeway. If it doesn’t have one, or the limit is over 100mph, it’s an owtoabaln.
@@tompatterson1548 Where in the world is there a road with a speed limit above 100 miles per hour without it being unlimited speed road?
@@tompatterson1548 I think 3 lanes is an essential part of motorway too, hence why not all A roads are motorways.
I generally agree, but MY spelling reform is obviously way better and doesn't have any of these problems because my spelling system is the best
/s
what does it mean when you put /s
@@efenty6235 sarcasm
@@efenty6235 it specifically means the end of a sarcastic comment, as it's based on the HTML format of yyyyyyyyyy.
háhá najs x̌ěokˀ
Well mine is the best one. No sarcasm.
7:54 I definitely disagree with this section. I find the Middle English vowels look much better and are much easier to read than the modern English versions you show. While I could read the Middle English spellings without much of any difficulty and my mind didn’t even consider that they were spelled weirdly (the “tofoo” example legitimately got me to question whether or not that’s how it’s usually spelled), the Modern English vowels you propose took me a second to figure out (suun looked like /sʌn/ not /sun/ and "griin" looked like /grɪn/ not /grin/) and looked incredibly wrong, even as someone fluent in languages that use “u” for /u/, “i” for /i/, etc.
I agree with you. I disagree with jan Misali on all three, the middle English versions look how they're pronounced although some are a little ugly, while the modern English ones are both ugly and unintuitive.
It like this:
Letter: O
The whole world: O
English: OU!
Letter A:
The whole world: A
Enlish: EY!
The letter I
The whole World: I
English: AY!
the letter U
the whole world: U (French: ...emmm... may be Ü?)
English: YU! A!
Others: WTF?!
I was looking for this comment
@@perf2.078 Considering that while all the other vowels shifting completely, U doing nothing more than picking up a stray yod is kind of impressive. In fact from what I can tell, [u] and [ju] are allophones in English being used somewhat interchangeably depending on the word and your accent. It's to the point that "yod-dropping" is a thing in some situations that does nothing but undo the prior change. Alternatively, it can merge with other sounds turning [tju] into [tʃu], [sju] into [ʃu], [dju] into [dʒu], and [zju] into [ʒu].
It-s jest e mater e taast. Dhaa suertenly simplifii mény parediimz, bet dhaa aulsou maac yer prouz reed liic e cros bitween Duch en e langgwij frem dhe Cauceses.
As someone with synesthesia (letters and numbers register as colours in my brain), most spelling reforms look wrong. This is because my mind is both accounting for how those letters register as sounds, but also their colouration. In daily life I find it easier to remember spellings as remembering colours is much simpler than remembering abstract symbols like the Latin alphabet.
Not a criticism, I just thought it would be interesting for people to read my personal experience
It is interesting
are you a female? or a male cat?
@@lastyhopper2792 what exactly does this mean?
@@lastyhopper2792 If you’re referring to my profile picture, I’m non-binary, and my fursona is not a cat but a bat/deer hybrid
That stuff about people messing up the strut vowel and schwa is so true. Almost every reform I've seen has been unspeakably ugly for that reason. Stuff like: "U mut went too thu pünd".
I personally think O would be the best schwa, if schwa had to be written with a consistent letter. U looks ugly and A needs to be used for /æ/ and /ɑ/.
Isn't ö in German a schwa ?
@@senesterium no
'Y' Best Schwa Letter.
i transcribed schwa with an apostrophe in my first spelling reform, but looking back i think merging its spelling with the strut vowel may have been a better approach
I thoroughly enjoyed the video and many of the points you bring up, and as an English as a foreign language speaker who is often baffled by English spelling and pronunciation, I strongly empathise with anyone's wish to come up with better rules. However - I disagree with your conclusion that the "ideal" spelling reform would be one where we agree to disagree on spelling and just write everything however we want.
I say this as a native Swiss German speaker - a language which doesn't have an official written form, so it's pretty much handled how you suggest English should be. Everyone transcribes words however they feel like, based loosely on general German phonetics. The word "I" ("ich" in proper German) can be spelt "ich", "i", "ii", "ig", "y" and probably a few other ways that I can't think of right now, simply based on someone's dialect and preference, and they're all equally correct or incorrect. This can definitely be fun, and you never have to spell check, but the downside is that deciphering someone's meaning can be incredibly difficult if they have a very different accent or just choose to spell very differently from you. I don't have numbers on this, but from my subjective impression, reading speed also suffers - reading something written in Swiss German would take longer than reading that same meaning, even the same words, in "proper" German.
Additionally, you can't really look anything up in a dictionary, because again the dictionary would likely not use the same spelling you do - finding the meaning of an obscure Swiss German word pretty much depends on luck, or having a large circle of acquaintances from different regions you can ask. The result is that official documents, business correspondence and 99.9% of all books are not written in Swiss German - they're all in "High German", official German with proper spelling and grammar. Swiss German is quaint and I adore it, being a spoken language with no official spelling: I wouldn't want it any other way. It can be fun, and in some cases, it allows you to bring out personality and nuances in your writing that a standardized spelling simply can't. But I cannot say that it's a very practical feature, and based on my experience, a language needs a standardized, agreed-upon form to be widely serviceable.
The disadvantages of giving that up for English would far outweigh the benefits IMO, and within that same generation that adopted this method, English would likely stop being the universal language of the world. And I can't have that, because the most likely language to replace it would be either Spanish or Chinese, and I don't speak either (and even if Chinese spelling and pronunciation were perfectly regular und unambiguous, which they're not, it would still be 10x more mind-boggling given my linguistic background than English could ever be).
With all that said - it turns out I'm quite happy to suffer the inconstancy of current English spelling and pronunciation all things considered! ;-)
I pretty agree with you, changing the english to a no rule how you spell type of language would complete stop being the lingua franca of the world in about 20 years. The english with your fuck up pronunciation kind of fit like a glove for the world lingua franca cus allow some one with a thick accent be understandable as much as a native is without much hassles.
i kind of agree with you but mild changes that don't make things genuinely hard to read aren't that bad for me
English would not stop being a lingau franca just because the spelling changed to be, if that were the case english would never have become a lingua franca in the first place. Also, I think both using your own spellings and 'standard' spellings can be done, and I think it already is, just based on how formally youre speaking. As in if you are writing a formal essay you would use "though" but if you are messaging a friend youd just write "tho"
@@roshan7988 English became a "universal language" because of the British empire. They brought their language with them around the world - forcibly in many cases. It only remains "universal" as a second language by precedent. Everyone already agrees on a language to speak internationally, so if that language were to change differently for different dialects, that would all go out the window, and we'd be in the market for a new lingua franca
@@TheZenytram I mean english already has no rules on how you spell it. English dictionaries are descriptive. There is no English Language academy.
Congrats on the fun spelling reform! As a non english speaker I have been able to read it quite fluently... Great job
There is one modern English spelling reform which has achieved moderate success, to the point that most dictionaries include it.
The phonetic alphabet. It does allow for multiple pronunciations, and doesn't use entirely the Latin alphabet, but is ascii compatible.
Sure it's not specifically an English spelling reform, but it's worth a mention.
IPA is not ASCII compatible. For instance, there is no schwa in ASCII.
Gretchen McCulloch made the compelling case in her book Because Internet that informal writing is already allowing variant spellings to indicate subtle differences in meaning. Many of these new conventions, despite initially being quite specific to particular platforms, are already beginning to make their way into more formal writing and demonstrate a widespread willingness to ignore manually defy autocorrect and experiment. I have great hopes that within a couple of generations many of these new variant spellings will be reanalysed as the new standard in broader communities, effectively making for something almost as good as the perfect spelling reform, especially if the current trend of loosening spelling conventions continues to get looser as stigma decreases. In the meantime however, new net dialects form every year (usually joke/meme forms like lolspeak, 1337speak, or owospeak), and already the internet has seen four major generations, each with multiple very distinct dialects, though admittedly most of the distinction has less to do with spelling than punctuation (primarily as a method of communicating tone and gesture).
"Gretchen McCulloch [argued] that informal writing is already allowing variant spellings to indicate subtle differences in meaning. " Yes, you could do, but will people understand them when you do?
@@rosiefay7283 yes. im part of some of these communities and everyone within them gets what the others are saying. if i say "hewwo my fewwow fwiends" or spell "actually" and "literally" like "akshully" and "lichrally" or "litrally" my friends can figure out what im talking about from surrounding context; "well akshully i think thisd b better" "i lichrally almost died" its hard to think of other things thos 2 stranjly speld words could be.
another thing i do is drop silent E off some words like close, love, time, maybe. idk why i do it, its just fun, and theres still enough of the original word left for ppl to know what i mean.
@@Nepeta-Leijon for "time", the e is there for a reason; it indicates the long I. Same for theme, tome, bloke, broke, brake, take, etc.
@@charliekahn4205 uhh yea i know. i learned from books at age three that the silent E turns cap into cape and fin into fine. sometimes, however,, it is simply fun to take the E off,..,.....,.,.,.. to remove it... add a littl flair 2 th interaction... also, Tim the name shows up in wildly different contexts from time the abstract noun or time the verb. if i send a message saying "somtims i get ice cream w lunch" its pretty obvious to my friends what i mean.
anyway my point is that custom spellings of words are already common in many internet communities, and it doesnt impede communication within those communities.
@@Nepeta-Leijon Imagine how impenetrable English would become if it developed a convention for different spelling based on meaning though.
Sometimes when reading the word “have” my brain stops working and reads it as “heiv” (like the “a” in “gave”).
As in "behave".
I really like this video, the suggestion that we as people can change spelling is very important. I personally change a fair bit of spelling and have my own kind of "reform" that I use in writing when its paper pencil.
This video reminded me of the "Bello orthography" in use in my country from 1844 to 1927 or thereabouts. It was a somewhat attenuated implementation of a very radical reform of Spanish spelling proposed by Andrés Bello.
It makes reading documents from the era extremely funny to me. Some of the more obscure changes were only occasionally observed, so it is interesting to see how some of them faded from use with time even while the reform was still in place.
Logographic reform: one emoji for every word
It's gonna happen eventually
In the grim darkness of 2030's, there are only emojis
Saturos02 so hieroglyphics?
@@pepurrmint 👍, 👏
Anime reform: English but spelled with Kanji/Hanzi/whatever Chinese characters
Marken Angel Scott McCloud needs to make a second sequel to Understanding Comics, this time about communicating thru emoji sequences and whether that’s a language or a comic, and if there’s even a difference in the age of the GPT-2 algorithm
Best thing in this video is the realization "the perfect spelling reform for English would be for English speakers globally to agree that that it's ok to misspell things".
So (as I already knew) basically the default medieval practices are the best.
As long as it doesn't break search too badly (i.e. can Google figure out two spellings are the same word).
Until you end up with mad lads like this fellow making up their own systems, the majority of which are unintuitive garbage. English then breaks down into a hundred different spelling systems and nobody can speak to each other anymore.
The aspects of English spelling that make it phonetically unintuitive are very often preserving etymologic and semantic relationships. I’m not exactly a spelling bee champion, but I like that I can look at a word, note by spelling that it has a Greek root, and infer a reasonable definition from that. For me, the spelling difficulty is worth preserving that information. Jan’s amateur/amature sign off line is a great example.
I've always believed it's okay to break a rule IF you know the rule and you know what you're doing. The problem is that most people _don't_ know the rules and _don't_ know what they're doing. "Loose" and "lose" being the one that irritates me the most. 😠
@@seal869 I don't know about that example..."amature" seems to indicate the word is coming from the gerund or gerundive of _amo,_ which obscures its meaning as a derived agentive noun. French loans in -teur, on the other hand, are well known always to be an agentive noun of some kind. You also know that it entered the language after the Restoration (roughly,) because its French spelling has been preserved rather than becoming *amater or something like that. And "amater," by the way, would be my choice for reforming that word, _if_ I were going to, which I wouldn't. (Well, probably "ammater," on second thought.)
I love the point you make at the end
Hahahah i love the fun riform. Only thing I can't get with is 'worm' for 'warm'. Association too strong
And the ending is so badass! What a fun time
Ah, yeah. I remember taking a stab at this. Took a rather scientific approach to it:
Step 1. Take a sample text, mine was about three or four paragraphs, and make a phonetic transcription by replacing all consonants with IPA equivalents and all vowels with representations of their lexical vowel (1 for FLEECE, 2 for KIT, 3 for BATH, etc.)
2. Make a set of rules (a bunch of regexes in my case) that took both the original spelling and the phonetic spelling, and produced an unambiguous reformed spelling, and use that to generate a new version of the sample text.
3. Calculate the delta (how different they are) between the original and the reform, then go back and just tweak the rule set over and over until that degree of separation becomes as small as you can manage.
The idea, then, is that whatever set of rules comes out of that process would be the minimum you'd actually have to change English in order to be unambiguous. It's not any more logical, still loads of nonsensical stuff (ee for long i, etc), but they're all nonsensical in the exact same, predictable way.
The only thing I remember out of that was that the result I ended up with looked shockingly like Dutch, with loads and loads of different vowel digraphs in stressed syllables. Maybe they were on to something...
share a sample!
Well, to be fair "tsunami" doesn't always have a silent t.
The t is there to reflect its Japanese pronunciation
Grant Hall I think what they mean is that some people do pronounce the t (I sometimes do and sometimes don’t)
I learn not all folks say the t in tsunami but I think it's weird given it's origins... But tbh I don't always make that t sound very notable. :/
It isn't hard to pronounce the "t" in "tsunami" if you can pronounce "pizza." I don't understand why people act like this consonant cluster is alien to English.
@@thegreatbutterfly
Depends how you pronounce it. Different dialects pronounce it different and it gets weird sometimes.
Pausing on your etymogical spelling reform gave me quite the fun challenge! The lack of translation for "algorithmic" threw me through quite the loop for a bit, but Google translate is an amazing tool. Also, how weird that karaoke's -oke came from English orchestra before returning to English through romaji!
Your last note about allowing misspelling, especially with the tho and thru example, actually add more complexity to the way I write rather than simplify it. It gives me a way to express sarcasm or even just casual speech, separating it from serious or professional stuff I've written. Maybe a bit like how Latin script is casually used in Serbia while more formal and Government-related things use Cyrillic.
I collect Swedish linguistic texts, and one thing which strikes me about phonetic reforms is how badly the spelling holds up. Sample texts of such reforms as young as fifty years old are already beginning to be hard to read simply because the words aren't pronounced that way anymore. So even if you settle on one dialect you still have the issue of chronolects.
My English dialect is very much suffering from a mixture of Chronolect and pronunciation is already suffering hardcore on some consonants. N's being connected to vowels time to time, More vowels than the standard, and just a living fossil in some parts of it. Starting to have CH -> SH, but rhotic R + Vowels have pitch accent, Hamburger's ER isn't doctor ( as a verb ) vs. doctor as a person. OR here is ER! A merger of mary, marry, and merry! R connectivity with accent marks would be beyond useful. Also triphong sounds being a by-product of southern drawl Draw being long vs. short depending on the use and pitch! Draw -> Drawing, is long when for illustration, but when it's a tie, it's short and higher pitch. i and e swap in words too much.
I'm German and we had a spelling reform when I was in primary school. It doesn't make it so you can unambiguously spell a word from its pronunciation, but it is damn close. Pronouncing a written word is even closer, with some notable exceptions being loanwords from English like "computer".
You have the same accent problem in German and they chose to define one Dialect as the main one - Standard German. I am fine with this. It's not the dialect I speak, but it is by far the best option. With English, this is a bit more tricky, since there is no Standard English. I think it is impossible to find one all-encompassing spelling that would make everyone say "yeah, fair enough".
I do think, however, that you can take the major regions of Anglophones and find one blessed dialect for each. In the UK, you have Received Pronunciation. In the US, you have Standard American, etc.
I still learnt to spell words as they were spelled before the reform. And you know what? Good riddance. Frisör makes far more sense than Friseur. (Loanword from French) Why, if you combine Schiff and Fahrt, did you get "Schiffahrt" and not "Schifffahrt"? (2 instead of 3 Fs). Delfin (dolphin) used to be written "Delphin", even though it is clearly an "F" sound and so on.
Overall, it just makes more sense. The usage of ß and "ss" is properly standardised, too and the pronunciation of words using them is predictable. (Vowel preceding ss is short, vowel preceding ß is long. They consonant itself has the same sound)
They also changed how some words are broken into syllables. Indianer (native american) used to be "in-di-an-er", while people would intuitively break it down into "in-di-a-ner". Single letter syllables were disallowed.
English could really do with a reform. Unfortunately, though, I don't think it will ever happen. The pronunciation is so out of whack with the spelling, that any changes would have to be massive, which is not implementable. And you further have the dialect problem, which is far more pronounced with English than it is with German.
(And we don't want to spell thinks like _they_ pronounce it, do we? ;D)
I'm actually surprised ß still has rules associated with it's use (aside from for historical reasons of course)
Something like a decade or two ago I had heard claims that it's use in German was considered obsolete, and would not be used at all going forward.
As for accents, yeah, I run into that whenever anyone online starts claiming they know an 'obvious' way to spell things phonetically in English, based on what they hear in a video...
Only to find that what they wrote doesn't match what I think it should sound like even slightly.
The IPA transliterations of various English accents show up just how widely they can vary too.
Entirely different sets of vowel sounds. Different consonants in places...
Based on the actual sounds used by various speakers, how could you EVER have a single spelling that is phonetically consistent with all of that?
(And the IPA obviously doesn't count because by virtue of capturing accents and dialects accurately, it means there are multiple phonetic spellings for the same word. - the upside of the IPA of course is that if you can learn to properly pronounce all the sounds, you can replicate not just someone's language, but their accent as well, from a written example.)
Americans weren't even open to the metric system. "Spelling reform? That's for commie sympathizers...."
Sure, everyone can agree on a standard dialect to use, but then what's the point? If you don't use that dialect, then you are not gaining a more accurate spelling -> pronounciation mapping.
Yes, standard English does not accurately reflect the way I pronounce words. But if Californians, or Brits, or Bostonians got to reform English, I doubt the spelling would better reflect my accent at all. Basically I am being asked to replace my spellings with another set that are just as equally inaccurate.
While some words might be more simplified, others would be made more difficult. Eg. Conlang Critic wants to change 'though' -> 'tho' (apparently it's obvious to him to spell it that way), but in my native accent, this would lose the difference in pronounciation between 'sought' and 'sot'.
I don't know German, but just the fact that you can all agree that there is a 'Standard German' is what lets you do a spelling reform. There really isn't a standard English that has a majority of speakers. English with it's ~billion or so speakers has become too big to reform.
The benefits of Standard German is that it was defined kind of a while ago as a compromise between the various dialects. So, at the time Hochdeutsch was created, no one actually spoke it. Unlike French taking the Parisian dialect and blessing it as the one-correct-way-to-speak, or Received Pronunciation being an English spoken in a narrow area of London, Spanish standardized on the Castilian spoken in Madrid, etc.
Germany being full of many independent states until recent history weirdly had some side benefits.
@@KuraIthys In Switzerland it has already been removed. It was removed well before the spelling reform of 1996. Its removal was considered in the spelling reform, but they decided against it, because it had lots of utility, was already on our keyboards, and :shrug: everyone was already well accustomed to the letter in Germany. Strasse looks weird, it’s Straße.
that last part made me smile
I HAVE THE POWER AND I AM GOING TO SPELL VAPOURWAVE LIKE MY ANCESTORS WOULD'VE SPELT IT
I feel like the internet has accelerated the change in spelling, because there’s so many word that are just so commonly shorted for ease of typing, like you mentioned with thru and tho
And there are so many words that are misspelled to convey a certain mood. “What” vs “wut” vs “wat” as a response is perhaps my favorite.
"A" starts with "E", "I" starts with "A", "U" starts with "Y", "E" starts with "I", etc. It's all broken from the very start damnit...
lol yeah ikr
THANK YOU
A starts with an e
E starts with an i
I starts with an A
And so the cycle repeats
O is with an o once more, and so the cycle repeats
U is with Y to W the cycle semi repeats when it get’s to D
A starts with E
B starts with B
C starts with S
D starts with D
E starts with I
F starts with E
G starts with J
H starts with E
I starts with A
J starts with J
In languages like Russian you can spell every word if you know the alphabet, every letter is one sound (no silent letters too)
We’re coming at this issue the wrong way, we need to change the way we speak to fit spelling. should be prounounounced /phlegm/
The concept of someone pronouncing the word phlegm as /phlegm/ is hilarious enough for me to unironically start campaigning for this. Y'know, /campaigning/
pahulegum
That’s basically how Polish people not knowing English read English words
No. Language is spoken first, and spelling should reflect that. Telling people "they're saying it wrong" is detestable
im cowchhing up so much flegg'm
As someone with dyslexia (and other related issues) your words at the end really mean a lot to me personally. I get very confused and upset when I have to physically write things out (usually for work) and inevitably mess things up. Im going to take what you've said more to jeart, because you're right. There really isn't a propper way to be writing
"Stop correcting each other's misspellings"
So the solution WAS to go back to the Middle English way of doing things after all.
Fine for private communiques, not so much public notices or international relations, IMO.
The whole "no rules" thing made me think of the book Frindle
Ayy, that’s a great book.
That was my favorite book in second grade! I love u for writing this comment!
That book is great
You just awakened a long-buried memory from my childhood, thank you
8:00
I'm sorry but what???? Suun and griin, looks absolutely awful. And Tofoo, keewee are looking really really nice and aesthetically pleasing while having cute memey touch to them
i agree
You mean *æsþetically
i think it's because seeing double o's and e's in english is perfectly fine, but when the douuble uu's and ii's start comiing ouut iit's iillegal
@@dinomaster420 why are you doing this to me
@@Dragoniiia lol it doesn't help that your name is dragoniiia with 3 i's
This whole video was really interesting and informative, thank you so much!
Personally, I will most likely always stick to the “normal” English spelling system, because I actually enjoy that it doesn’t make sense. It’s really funny, and it feels good when you learn English and are good at spelling, because it means you accomplished something which isn’t entirely easy. It makes me proud.
Seeing other people misspell words bothers me, but that’s just my opinion, and, if it is a way to show disapproval of the current spelling system, then I wouldn’t dream of stopping anyone from writing in whichever way they see fit. Go spell things within the bounds of your own rules, by any means ;))
I gotta say, I like your fun riform spelling better than regular english. I don't like the way how different people can arbitrarily spell things differently, because for reading it is nice to recognize how a word "looks". So having a lot of different "pictures" for a lot of words makes reading slower.
Love how your etymological spelling acknowledges how "language" was "dingua" in archaic Latin. Thanks for all the Dinguistics
OMG I had no idea! So there's the missing link between "lingua" and "tongue"! Amazing. Danguages never cease to astound.
I feel like if everyone spelled everything differently then reading would be come extremely hard for people who can't sound out words.
But eventually we’ll get tu a point where the sounds are standard
Kan we at least just spell the sound K makes with a K, like we do in certain words like "king, like, make, shake"? It's not hard; karakter, komment, chokolate, skreen, and abbreviations that has bekome words over time like skuba.
The end was really interesting, I had never thought of it like that before
Thank u for ack-knoledging that the best spelling reform would be for us to ignore spelling mistakes
Something I found interesting about the Fun Riform was the false cognates with German (auf und wer) as well as the seemingly "nordic" spellings. I feel like it kind of sends English back a bit to its roots
So writen Scots text
I guess it goes to show how subjective the whole aesthetic part really is that I thought the complete opposite for which of the examples you listed looked nicer
Big same !!! I was so confused
looking at you, french
Oh wow, i love the conclusion so much
I luv that, I'm gunna go and use the reform at the end to great affect
I had a teacher named Ms. Fuchs who pronounced it /fjuʃ/ ("fyoosh"), so the "chsi" ending for "ghochsi" is close to being familiar to me
Dan L Hee hee. /fʌks/
She definitely pronounced it that way because it's German and sounds almost like "fucks"
"Fuchs" is German for "fox", and the German pronunciation is "fooks" (like "looks" or "books"). You can guess how the number 6 is pronounced, which is spelled "sechs"...
Isn't it just "fuchsia" without the last two letters?
Actually, scratch that, I could never spell "fuchsia" for most of my life.
@@HerbertLandei isn't sechs pronounced "zeks"?
My spelling reform is replacing all instances of the approximant R with the polygraph eowgh.
Eowghevolutionary idea, sieowgh
Eowghound and eowghound the eowghushing eowghiveeowgh eowgholled
@@woodfur00 That... that hurt me a little bit. Just on the inside, and only a little bit. But it did hurt me.
Makes sense eowgheally
This is actually hilaeowghious
amachure
haha the perfect speling reform feels so good and rebelious to use
Your conclusion reminds me of something very specific.
So my dad found three giant books that are actually about a decade's worth of a Vermont newspaper called the Vermont Watchman & State Journal from the 1870s. 1875 or so was around the time when spelling bees were getting popular around the US.
There was a story about how Mark Twain hosting a spelling bee in Connecticut and how he gave a speech where he basically said that spelling shouldn't matter and the variety in the spelling of words allows for more creativity.
10:10 freaking THANK YOU.
My goodness we spend so much time in school drilling spelling into kids heads and for what? A test and a grade. Thats it. They wont remember any of it. I dont remember anything i learned in spelling. Why not just let people misspell things?
If it's a misspelling that is still easily recognizable as what it's supposed to be, then fine. The problems arise when words start to become unrecognizable. I think spelling standardization gets a bad rap, thought of as just a bunch of arbitrary rules made up by a bunch of uppity elitists, but it does actually help to keep most people on the same page. Laujc imadsin dhet pipl aul speld wyrdz inne wej dhet wes moust entuwitiv tu dhem. Riding vyrtsiuelij eni gyvn caunvyrsejtsion aun dhi Yntyrnet wud bi e lyving naujtmer, wud yt naut? Ju wud get so taujyrd ev yntyrpreting itsi yndyvydsiuel pyrsen's yntrpreteysien ev dhe lejnguedsi dhet ju wud eventsiuelij staup baudhyring tu rid dhem at aul.
@@thethrashyone what a cheeky response. love it
Bring back eth and thorn. Also, everything should be written in the form of alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse.
yes we should bring back eth and thorn and call it a spelling reform
Don't use thorn; it looks too much like p. Use the Greek letter theta (θ). Instead of eth, use the Greek letter delta, or dhelta (δ).
@@justushall9634 Wouldn't capital Δ look a bit like a stylised A? I think Ð and ð, or Ð and δ would be okay.
Have you heard of Anglish? Their goal is to only use Germanic words, by keeping what Germanic words we have already, bring back old words, and create new ones using quite a lot of combining. You should check it out
I want to have more words that sound like loch.
Thank you! The 'ghoti' thing has always pissed me off (when used unironically as an example, I mean) but I haven't had the language to say why it's wrong until now
To me looks better than , looks better than , and looks better than . Like I agree that the second spellings are more logical when considering how English vowels sound now, but for [u], for [i], and for [ej] look much, MUCH better to me, probably because uu and ii are all but unprecedented in current English orthography (the only example I can think of is the standard English spelling of Hawaii, without the okina between the i's in the Hawaiian language spelling of Hawaii)