hypothetically, let’s say you were tasked with simplifying the English language. how would you go about doing that, and why?
to start with an easy one, the first thing I would do is eliminate silent letters from all words and make it so no letters share sounds. for example, example would become exampel. then, because x would no longer be around or at least wouldn’t have that sound, ekzampel. I would also consider eliminating mulit-letter sounds like ch, and replacing them with single characters (probably the ones that got removed).
A lot of these answers are working towards the idea of having consistent grapheme (letter or letter combo) to sound (phoneme) relationships. ie the letter ‘a’ would always represent the same sound, and that sound would always be represented by the letter ‘a’. This is called ideal phonemic orthography.
English has whatever the opposite of phonemic orthography is; depending on your accent, the letter ‘a’ has about 7 sounds the most common being ‘o’ as in ‘what’. It’s extremely unhelpful when teaching kids to read English.
Languages seem to pick up a lot of cruft over time as they grow, absorb loanwords and just change because language, so you usually only move towards phonemic orthography with some deliberate act, usually by the government.
An example might be Indonesia really wanting a national language to tie a very diverse population together after the second world war. I think they still have a government department who makes pronouncements about the language. The result of this is you could learn to correctly pronounce Indonesian in about 10 minutes, and read an Indonesian newspaper to a native speaker and it would be almost entirely intelligible to them even though you didn’t know the meaning of what you were reading.
didn’t know there was a word for it but yeah, that’s exactly what I had in mind. I’d also want to fix some grammar rules but grammar barely matters anyway (I’m from east texas, grammar is for talking to people who don’t know me well enough to decode my slurring).
Go read 1984 sometime. It includes a blueprint for “simplifying” English.
what do you mean?
cool but that’s not relevant to the post at all
One common used approach is to limit the total amount of words. When a complex word is needed, a simpler explanation is used instead. Randall Munroe (xkcd) did this for his book “Thing Explainer”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer He only used the 1000 most common words in English to write his book.
There is also Simple English Wikipedia, where people attempt to explain stuff for people with a low reading level. That way they can improve their reading and knowledge base, which is honestly such a cool thing to have in this world. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Isn’t English already pretty simple as languages go?
hell no we’re just used to it. it could definitely be worse but if you look closer you’ll see and kinds of fucked up grammar rules and unnecessary letters.
You should read Highly Irregular. It’s a book about the history of the English language. It explains how and why the language was corrupted by multiple changes in administration text, the great vowel shift, and the printing press. It makes perfect sense of why the language makes no sense.
Remove the letter “c”.
space, face, place etc. replace with “s” as it makes the “s” sound
score, scum etc. replace with “k” as it makes the “k” sound
Also what is the point of the letter “q” if it’s only followed by “u”, make the letter “q” mean “qu” to save space.
replace “ph” with “f”.
raplace instances or “y” where it makes the same sound as “i” with “i”.
Ie. the famous Bakunin quote: “In antiquity slaves were, in all honesty called slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are called wage earners.” ~ Mikhail Bakunin
would become “In antiqiti slaves were, in all honesti, kalled slaves. In the middle ages, they took the name of serfs. Nowadays they are kalled wage earners.”
I wish to direct you to the shavian alphabet: https://shavian.info/
looks cool
I’d keep c around for the ch sound, like Italian (I think they do that, anyway)
Or remove the letter “c” as it is currently used and replace instances of “ch” with “c”.
that’s what I was thinking too towards the end but forgot to mention it specifically. I think that’s the best thing to do with the unnecessary letters as it reduces the need for letter combinations.
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I’ve thought things like what you’re saying. Couldn’t you just spell it e-k-z-a-m-p-l? I don’t think there is an e sound in there.
How would you handle when to use the long and short sounds for vowels? For example how would you differentiate between the word lick and like. Would you just have more vowels or put symbols above them? Personally I like using multiple vowels in a row to make different sounds like in the word sound. I would come up with a standard way of doing those so you would spell town t-o-u-n.
People pronounce things differently, so you’d really be forcing pronunciations if you reworked the language. Like Some people actually pronounce egg with an e sound but most people use a long a sound. Also now that I think of it I think I pronounce example wore like e-g-z-a-m-p-l.
Lick -> Lik Like -> Laik
that spelling of example would work too. I was trying to make the letters show a ek-zam-pel pronunciation, but I’m not sure if the e is necessary.
lick and like could be lik (no c or silent letters) and lyk (no silent letters and the I sound used replaced with a y). I agree that multi-vowel sounds (oo) should stay around, but I think some could be replaced such as ee, which I would represent with a single I similar to Spanish. toun looks good.
I also pronounce it that way, what I was trying to do was represent the same sounds in a way that is simpler to read. realistically people will still pronounce things however they want and with whatever accent they have, but it will be easier to sound an unfamiliar word out or to determine how a word should be written if you’ve only heard it out loud and not written down.
No more consonants. Only vowels.
Oooooeuuuueoooo
