Saturday, February 06, 2016
Pontless ognons
In the rumble about the latest "simplification" from Academie Francaise, one point seems to have been missed by both writers and commenters.
When you eliminate a diacritic or a peculiar spelling ONLY ON SOME WORDS, you haven't simplified anything. Keyboards still need to include the diacritic. Students still need to learn the odd combination. Nothing has changed. You've stirred up anger and mistrust for zero gain.
The Soviets made a similar mistake when they simplified Russian spelling. Several redundant letters were cut out entirely, but the nearly useless 'hard sign' ъ remained. This is used only in one or two specific situations. In practice you only see it in verbs with the об prefix before a palatalized vowel. The ъ tells you not to palatalize the б. Since Russian is already full of exceptions to the palatalizing rule that aren't marked by a sign, you can assume that readers can remember this exception without a special sign.
English doesn't need simplified spelling. Meaningful reform would have to change EVERYTHING. The result would be unrecognizable. What we need is simplified inflections.
We've already eliminated 90% of Indo-European inflections; the remaining 10% are jumbled. You could get bang for the buck by cutting out the -s on 3rd sing present verbs and the -s genitive. Like the ъ in Russian, both are completely unnecessary, non-orthogonal and confusing. Let -s be plural and nothing else.
English doesn't need simplified spelling. Meaningful reform would have to change EVERYTHING. The result would be unrecognizable. What we need is simplified inflections.
We've already eliminated 90% of Indo-European inflections; the remaining 10% are jumbled. You could get bang for the buck by cutting out the -s on 3rd sing present verbs and the -s genitive. Like the ъ in Russian, both are completely unnecessary, non-orthogonal and confusing. Let -s be plural and nothing else.Labels: Language update
¶ 4:34 AM
