Linguistic purism in English is a different topic now than it use to be with English as an international language. I believe spelling reform to be the much more fruitful topic.
It would be interesting if the common availability of spellcheck turned out to obviate such reform. Technology would be retarding progress and enabling ossification in this instance.
Spellcheck more or less solves the needs of an educated native speaker who occasionally forgets weird spellings. But there's still a huge economic and educational burden to teaching spelling to kids and (especially) the millions of non-native learners.
It seems to me that issues like this are far more pressing for languages like Japanese and Chinese, where the rise of fonts and IMEs makes it technically unfeasible to create or change the fundamental building blocks of words (kanji).
For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
>It seems to me that issues like this are far more pressing for languages like Japanese and Chinese, where the rise of fonts and IMEs makes it technically unfeasible to create or change the fundamental building blocks of words (kanji).
This is not a technological issue, it's a social one. After the American conquest of Japan the American occupation forces were quite keen on the idea of language reform, whether using romaji or one of the native syllabaries. The idea died a death when they compared ease of decoding/reading speed. Japanese speakers, even not terribly well educated ones in terms of years of education were on a level with English speakers. Mao wanted to replace the hanzi with pinyin (the modern romanisation used in the PRC) but didn't feel it was worth the political cost. Replacing the hanzi/kanji would be a boon for foreigners but a massive and unnecessary disruption for Japanese and Chinese speakers.
>For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
Korean is a very different case from Japanese or Chinese. If the Japanese hadn't conquered Korea they'd probably be using some combination of hanja (hanzi/kanji) and hangul (the syllabary used in modern Korea (North and South). To be fair that's the case nowadays but there are less than 300 hanja that every educated Korean would know. Any literate Japanese person knows over two thousand. The kanji aren't going anywhere in Japanese. They're the words that you use for educated, literate speech.
I wonder how relevant technology has been to the reduction in kanji. It seems like the technical difficulties in adding kanji pale in comparison to the social difficulties of teaching the new kanji to the public; especially when you realize that this is the language that gave us emojis.
Further, my lay understanding of Japanese history is that their have been many attempts to reduce or eliminate kanji usage.
>I wonder how relevant technology has been to the reduction in kanji.
Actually IMEs have led to a resurgence in kanji usage. A lot of words that normal people could not (and were not expected to) write in kanji are now used online every day, to the extent that grade schools now teach them as kanji to appear on reading tests but not to be graded in handwritten essays. The most famous example of these "read only" kanji is 鬱 ('utsu', depression or melancholy), introduced to the school system in 2013 (iirc).
Also words that can be written in either kanji or kana but with a preference for kana in modern edited text are often written in kanji online (like 或いは instead of あるいは).
People spelling things nonstandardly is not really a serious issue in the first place. It's the extra information that must be learned, raising the bar for non-native speakers and people with a learning disability.
A major problem of English spelling reform is that pronunciation varies widely among native speakers. That problem is only made worse by an even greater number of non-native speakers having appeared, with an even greater variety of pronunciations.
If you say t'meito and I say t'mahto, and a Spanish speaker says tomato and a Korean speaker says 토마토 and a Japanese speaker says トマト, none of which are phonetically the same, it seems like spelling it 'tomato' is as good a system as any.
I was about to say the same thing. For example, I speak a non-rhotic dialect of English (Australian) in which the "r" is silent in many words (e.g. "hard"); whereas in many other dialects (e.g. most US dialects) that "r" is pronounced. So, dropping the "r" from the spelling of that word would make it more phonetic for me, but less phonetic for most Americans.
To introduce phonetic spelling into English, you'd need to either privilege one dialect's pronunciation over all the others (which speakers of those other dialects would be unlikely to accept), or else you'd end up with far greater spelling variation between different dialects of English than exists at present (which would harm international communication.)
The other problem with phonetic spelling is that phonology changes faster than orthography. If we adopted phonetic spelling tomorrow, then within a few generations many of those spellings likely wouldn't be phonetic any more. Keeping orthography reasonably fixed over time (even as pronunciation changes) makes it easier for us to understand the written texts of past generations.
In German we went with the first option: elevate one dialect.
I heard in Turkish they went with another option: everything is spelled phonetically, and there's a `standard' pronunciation / spelling. But I heard of a case where some people spell a word differently, because they pronounce it differently. (And that's seen not as a failing of these people's spelling.)
I had a friend from Austria who told me some words were spelt differently in 'Austrian German' than in Germany. So I think the same problem exists.
I'm Australian we mostly use British English. The biggest complaint for me is in Programming language API's. "colour" vs "color" and "centre" vs "center" have cause me so many syntax errors.
But do note that German doesn't have a phonetic spelling (like Turkish or Italian). It has a standardized spelling.
For example with the last spelling reform, the rules for writing an ß or ss got streamlined. The rules follow the pronounciation of _some_ German speakers. If your region doesn't have the same pronounciation you can't rely on that but have to learn the rules.
German being a pluricentric language and therefore people knowing that one spelling doesn't fit all, different spellings for different regions is just a pragmatic matter of fact. The various governmental and non-governmental organizations that work together for defining the official spelling just try to minimize the rules for spelling. So that German spelling doesn't become the abomination that English or French spelling is. ;-)
Also we should remember that the official spelling is not mandatory. Nobody will sue you if you write "kuhl" instead of "cool" (unless you are a civil servant). There are of course soft factors at work so that your spelling isn't that far from the official one but there are still lots of people that write according to the old rules from before the spelling reform from 1996.
Apparently not even pupils. There have been various reports in the last years that the spelling of pupils is getting worse as lots of teachers don't enforce the spelling.
"Let them write how they feel writing, don't interrupt their creative processes with not so important rules".
That'd be interesting but I remember when there was that whole movement of people wanting Esperanto to be a world wide language and look what happened to that
If we're talking about spelling reform in the sense of a more global standardisation, then I don't think pronunciation matters much. The relationship between spelling and pronunciation is already pretty arbitrary.
It's one reason english got in this mess in the first place:
> From the 16th century onward, English writers who were scholars of Greek and Latin literature tried to link English words to their Graeco-Latin counterparts. They did this by adding silent letters to make the real or imagined links more obvious. Thus det became debt (to link it to Latin debitum), dout became doubt (to link it to Latin dubitare), sissors became scissors and sithe became scythe (as they were wrongly thought to come from Latin scindere), iland became island (as it was wrongly thought to come from Latin insula), ake became ache (as it was wrongly thought to come from Greek akhos), and so forth.[6][7]
If spelling and pronunciation differ, why is it that spelling needs to change? Clearly the right solution is pronunciation reform.
(And given that there are many pronunciations in common usage, we can't alter the spelling to fit them all. And there are essentially only two spelling systems, and they only differ in minor ways.)
It seems odd that Orwell advocated for English purism, 1984 makes it seem like using 'base' English words as building blocks and eliminating unnecessary, flowery language was synonymous with fascism (or at least not a good thing)
The threat of newspeak is that it can render concepts unspeakable. Orwell advocated using words better. A simple word that bears the right meaning is better than a complex word that has nuance, but in having nuance is flabby. He complains in particular that "prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house." He claims that there is political intent behind the trendy language of the day. He's probably right. I will walk out of the conference room the next time someone tells me to "drill down" or "circle back" or "touch base". I'll do it for Orwell.
Think of it as a cargo cult of language; play-acting at meaning-saying: Language wielded like a ritual dagger instead of a tool.
You can recognize some examples of what he'd complain about if you pay attention to that sense. I'm annoyed by lots of uses of English; I must be fun to be around. I can't say they're misuses, but i dislike them. My favorite might be "I would argue", followed by... the author making an argument? Why the distancing? It's a verbal tick. It creates an air of passivity or detachment which is immediately contradicted by the words that follow. I suppose there's an idea these days that being detached and emotionless confers objectivity and wisdom, but I can't say i know at all for certain why people write or speak the way they do.
Language should stick to meaning like muscle to bone.
I think Orwell's view of language is the same basic principle as engineering: keep it as simple as possible. Don't make it too simple as to lose meaning, but don't needlessly overcomplicate things either.
> My favorite might be "I would argue", followed by... the author making an argument [..] I suppose there's an idea these days that being detached and emotionless confers objectivity and wisdom
I would argue Orwell would definitely get downvoted all the time on HN for saying clearly his opinion and not masquerading it in an etiquette of apparent self-doubt. ;)
I really like his essay on politics and language, thanks for the reminder.
I was going to comment that they're about a thousand years too late with this, but then read the article and saw that that was precisely the point.
It's a lovely thought that, in this modern day, we might once again unlock our wordhoards!
I once read a poem by Seamus Heaney (who also re-translated Beowulf) in which the language of the poem itself recapitulated the development of English over the centuries. It was really quite beautiful, though a bare five minutes of Googling has not turned up the name.
edit: I think it's the Bone Dream sequence, from the collection North.
Yeah, I like his translation. I think in the intro he speaks about discovering that the word 'þolian' in Beowulf was used pretty commonly by someone in his family, in its modern incarnation, thole, and was fascinated by that coincidence. [and the kicker, IIRC, was the speaker thought it more indigenous (to Ireland) than the "regular" English words.]
Is there a spellchecker or style-checker which helps you write plain pre-Norman English (or another "pure" form of English)? In it's simplest form it could just be a dictionary of acceptable words. A more sophisticated version would suggest "pure" replacements of impure words.
Pre-Norman English looks like this - "Wé Gárdena in géardagum þéodcyninga þrym gefrúnon hú ðá æþelingas ellen fremedon". I reckon you'd have to sacrifice quite a lot of intelligibility in your quest for purity.
That's not quite fair. Sure, it'd be cool to bring back þ, ð, æ & ȝ, and maybe even to have Anglo-Saxon as a kind of priestly or formal tongue. But that's not needful. One can choose to use 'hearty' instead 'cordial' &c. I wouldn't mind a tool which helped me choose words of Anglo-Saxon parentage rather than Latin, when they exist.
The want of linguistic purity is superfluous, and contrary to how languages develop. In the comforts of daily life polyglots fuse their multiple languages together, creating a new dialect.
I'm no linguist but one can clearly observe this in japanese "Engrish" (which is a real phenomenon abroad, my former sensei had stories of mispronounced English being taught in schools and understood locally), or in hybrids like Afrikaans or Portuguese. Or in any of the regional dialects that spring up in mixed cultures.
"Pure" languages like Esperanto are neat, and I think they can serve a legitimate and useful role at the world's table, but a language that fights impurities has to constantly push against a strong current. (See: French.) Real language is messy -- because if the majority of people break some rule of grammar together, it becomes the new grammar!
Also, those examples of 'pure' Modern English were ugly/crude-looking/inelegant :(
Portuguese is not a hybrid language, it's a romance language, a direct descendant of Latin with some influences from classical Greek, the same as Spanish, French, Italian and so on.
Modern English could more easily be classified as "hybrid" than Portuguese, given how much it is influenced by both French and Germanic languages.
Not at all. It sounds different from European Portuguese, similarly to how American English sounds different from British English, but they are the same language, and mutually intelligible.
There are local dialects influenced by the languages you mention and others, but Portuguese is Portuguese, like English is English, with the normal variations you would expect from a language widely spoken around the world. European and Brazilian Portuguese native speakers can communicate with each other easily, share TV shows, etc.
Of course this is anecdotal, but my wife is Brazilian (from Minas Gerais) and struggles to talk with European Portuguese people (sorry!), and needs subtitles to understand it in a film.
Even in my Portuguese textbook it says that there is significantly more difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese than between UK and US English.
I think the main issue you are alluding to is phonetic. European Portuguese speakers tend to really close their vowels, while Brazilian speakers open them. The end result is that it is easy for Europeans to understand Brazilians, but not necessarily the other way around.
I have seen this happen with English speakers, by the way. I remember a friend from the US needing subtitles to follow a British comedy show.
Would your wife have any trouble reading this, for example:
http://publico.pt ?
Portuguese is a pretty obvious mix of Spanish and French. I wasn't aware there were other predominant influences (though there always are)
And you're right about English, there's a joke about how our tongue stalks other unsuspecting languages in dark alleyways, knocking them out when opportune to steal loose grammar and vocabulary
What makes Portuguese a mix of Spanish and French and not, as TelmoMenezes says, yet another child of Latin? How do you categorize Romansh, Languedoc, Galician, Sardinian, and all the others?
Most of the words I've encountered in written Portuguese appeared to be either Spanish or French, or visually a combination of the two. It's another child of Latin, alongside Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, and others. I don't know the history and I don't intend that Portuguese is a child of the two, only that it is another product of the Latin echo chamber by way of its two most visually apparent influences.
I've never had any purposeful encounters with any of the languages you mention, though I would certainly like to!
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. -- James Nicoll (originally posted to Usenet!)
It might be interesting to consider bodies some countries have created to regulate language use. In particular, in some some cases (as far as I'm aware), they do their best to purge the language of foreign loanwords. See French's Académie française and Hindi's Central Hindi Directorate.
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[ 777 ms ] story [ 1411 ms ] threadFor Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
This is not a technological issue, it's a social one. After the American conquest of Japan the American occupation forces were quite keen on the idea of language reform, whether using romaji or one of the native syllabaries. The idea died a death when they compared ease of decoding/reading speed. Japanese speakers, even not terribly well educated ones in terms of years of education were on a level with English speakers. Mao wanted to replace the hanzi with pinyin (the modern romanisation used in the PRC) but didn't feel it was worth the political cost. Replacing the hanzi/kanji would be a boon for foreigners but a massive and unnecessary disruption for Japanese and Chinese speakers.
>For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
Korean is a very different case from Japanese or Chinese. If the Japanese hadn't conquered Korea they'd probably be using some combination of hanja (hanzi/kanji) and hangul (the syllabary used in modern Korea (North and South). To be fair that's the case nowadays but there are less than 300 hanja that every educated Korean would know. Any literate Japanese person knows over two thousand. The kanji aren't going anywhere in Japanese. They're the words that you use for educated, literate speech.
I meant that fonts and IMEs make it technically unfeasible to change kanji or create new ones.
> kanji .. are the words that you use for educated, literate speech.
But not for neologisms. That's what my post was about.
Further, my lay understanding of Japanese history is that their have been many attempts to reduce or eliminate kanji usage.
Actually IMEs have led to a resurgence in kanji usage. A lot of words that normal people could not (and were not expected to) write in kanji are now used online every day, to the extent that grade schools now teach them as kanji to appear on reading tests but not to be graded in handwritten essays. The most famous example of these "read only" kanji is 鬱 ('utsu', depression or melancholy), introduced to the school system in 2013 (iirc).
Also words that can be written in either kanji or kana but with a preference for kana in modern edited text are often written in kanji online (like 或いは instead of あるいは).
If you say t'meito and I say t'mahto, and a Spanish speaker says tomato and a Korean speaker says 토마토 and a Japanese speaker says トマト, none of which are phonetically the same, it seems like spelling it 'tomato' is as good a system as any.
To introduce phonetic spelling into English, you'd need to either privilege one dialect's pronunciation over all the others (which speakers of those other dialects would be unlikely to accept), or else you'd end up with far greater spelling variation between different dialects of English than exists at present (which would harm international communication.)
The other problem with phonetic spelling is that phonology changes faster than orthography. If we adopted phonetic spelling tomorrow, then within a few generations many of those spellings likely wouldn't be phonetic any more. Keeping orthography reasonably fixed over time (even as pronunciation changes) makes it easier for us to understand the written texts of past generations.
I heard in Turkish they went with another option: everything is spelled phonetically, and there's a `standard' pronunciation / spelling. But I heard of a case where some people spell a word differently, because they pronounce it differently. (And that's seen not as a failing of these people's spelling.)
I'm Australian we mostly use British English. The biggest complaint for me is in Programming language API's. "colour" vs "color" and "centre" vs "center" have cause me so many syntax errors.
For example with the last spelling reform, the rules for writing an ß or ss got streamlined. The rules follow the pronounciation of _some_ German speakers. If your region doesn't have the same pronounciation you can't rely on that but have to learn the rules.
German being a pluricentric language and therefore people knowing that one spelling doesn't fit all, different spellings for different regions is just a pragmatic matter of fact. The various governmental and non-governmental organizations that work together for defining the official spelling just try to minimize the rules for spelling. So that German spelling doesn't become the abomination that English or French spelling is. ;-)
Also we should remember that the official spelling is not mandatory. Nobody will sue you if you write "kuhl" instead of "cool" (unless you are a civil servant). There are of course soft factors at work so that your spelling isn't that far from the official one but there are still lots of people that write according to the old rules from before the spelling reform from 1996.
"Let them write how they feel writing, don't interrupt their creative processes with not so important rules".
> From the 16th century onward, English writers who were scholars of Greek and Latin literature tried to link English words to their Graeco-Latin counterparts. They did this by adding silent letters to make the real or imagined links more obvious. Thus det became debt (to link it to Latin debitum), dout became doubt (to link it to Latin dubitare), sissors became scissors and sithe became scythe (as they were wrongly thought to come from Latin scindere), iland became island (as it was wrongly thought to come from Latin insula), ake became ache (as it was wrongly thought to come from Greek akhos), and so forth.[6][7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
That wiki also lists a number of proposed spelling reforms.
(And given that there are many pronunciations in common usage, we can't alter the spelling to fit them all. And there are essentially only two spelling systems, and they only differ in minor ways.)
Think of it as a cargo cult of language; play-acting at meaning-saying: Language wielded like a ritual dagger instead of a tool.
You can recognize some examples of what he'd complain about if you pay attention to that sense. I'm annoyed by lots of uses of English; I must be fun to be around. I can't say they're misuses, but i dislike them. My favorite might be "I would argue", followed by... the author making an argument? Why the distancing? It's a verbal tick. It creates an air of passivity or detachment which is immediately contradicted by the words that follow. I suppose there's an idea these days that being detached and emotionless confers objectivity and wisdom, but I can't say i know at all for certain why people write or speak the way they do.
Language should stick to meaning like muscle to bone.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...
I would argue Orwell would definitely get downvoted all the time on HN for saying clearly his opinion and not masquerading it in an etiquette of apparent self-doubt. ;)
I really like his essay on politics and language, thanks for the reminder.
It's a lovely thought that, in this modern day, we might once again unlock our wordhoards!
I once read a poem by Seamus Heaney (who also re-translated Beowulf) in which the language of the poem itself recapitulated the development of English over the centuries. It was really quite beautiful, though a bare five minutes of Googling has not turned up the name.
edit: I think it's the Bone Dream sequence, from the collection North.
I'm no linguist but one can clearly observe this in japanese "Engrish" (which is a real phenomenon abroad, my former sensei had stories of mispronounced English being taught in schools and understood locally), or in hybrids like Afrikaans or Portuguese. Or in any of the regional dialects that spring up in mixed cultures.
"Pure" languages like Esperanto are neat, and I think they can serve a legitimate and useful role at the world's table, but a language that fights impurities has to constantly push against a strong current. (See: French.) Real language is messy -- because if the majority of people break some rule of grammar together, it becomes the new grammar!
Also, those examples of 'pure' Modern English were ugly/crude-looking/inelegant :(
A "want of" something means a 'lack of' - "The kingdom was lost for want of a nail"
You probably want "the want for"
Portuguese is not a hybrid language, it's a romance language, a direct descendant of Latin with some influences from classical Greek, the same as Spanish, French, Italian and so on.
Modern English could more easily be classified as "hybrid" than Portuguese, given how much it is influenced by both French and Germanic languages.
There are local dialects influenced by the languages you mention and others, but Portuguese is Portuguese, like English is English, with the normal variations you would expect from a language widely spoken around the world. European and Brazilian Portuguese native speakers can communicate with each other easily, share TV shows, etc.
Even in my Portuguese textbook it says that there is significantly more difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese than between UK and US English.
I think the main issue you are alluding to is phonetic. European Portuguese speakers tend to really close their vowels, while Brazilian speakers open them. The end result is that it is easy for Europeans to understand Brazilians, but not necessarily the other way around.
I have seen this happen with English speakers, by the way. I remember a friend from the US needing subtitles to follow a British comedy show.
Would your wife have any trouble reading this, for example: http://publico.pt ?
And you're right about English, there's a joke about how our tongue stalks other unsuspecting languages in dark alleyways, knocking them out when opportune to steal loose grammar and vocabulary
I've never had any purposeful encounters with any of the languages you mention, though I would certainly like to!
Here's a wiki in Anglish. It looks very fun.