102 year old man discussing English spelling.

[Shaun__]

Honestly, I kinda like the fact that English has such weird spellings. It leads to puns, and I like puns.

Do you read Piers Anthony?

Xanth is fun, though the newer books aren't as good as the older ones. The older ones, the puns were secondary to the story, and added a little flavor. The newer books, it feels like he tried to fit as many puns as possible into the stories, sometimes twisting the story a bit just to fit the pun.

The earlier stories were the best ones. I think he has to publish a set amount of books every year, and the puns push his word count up.

 

[Jupiter551]

Resort to insulting other people? You're the only one here who's been insulting people.

Hi Jupiter I want you to meet this dude I know Jupiter.

you blithering idiot.

minority of idiots who can't be bothered to learn?

in order to please a minority of ignoramuses?

a bunch of lazy shits

That's what non-lazy people do. People who aren't so arrogant as to think language should be uprooted and changed to suit THEM.

I noticed you ignored the historical precedent of what I am talking about again. All you seem capable of is insulting people with trouble learning how to spell, and calling me names for disagreeing with you. Where are your facts? You have said nothing constructive in a long time.

I said everything I have to say about the topic several posts back, since then it's just been responding to your immature little tantrums.

Congratulations on taking a bunch of quotes out of context. I called you an idiot because you claimed there was no relation between written mathematics and language, when clearly they're BOTH an agreed group of signifiers that we use to communicate. English is not difficult. Even those with basic education can master it. My grandfather left school at 13, and spelled and wrote very well his entire life - like most of his generation.

I stand by my comments - if someone cannot learn to spell correctly they've either not bothered to try (ie the lazy comment) or have no interest in language (ignoramuses). To decide to change everything to please a small group of people who can't be assed learning the most basic things necessary to function in our society is, as I said, arrogant. What's more it's completely moronic.

Don't take it out on me that your brilliant idea has been shot down by everyone who answered.

 

[Shaun__]

I said everything I have to say about the topic several posts back, since then it's just been responding to your immature little tantrums.

Congratulations on taking a bunch of quotes out of context. I called you an idiot because you claimed there was no relation between written mathematics and language, when clearly they're BOTH an agreed group of signifiers that we use to communicate. English is not difficult. Even those with basic education can master it. My grandfather left school at 13, and spelled and wrote very well his entire life - like most of his generation.

I stand by my comments - if someone cannot learn to spell correctly they've either not bothered to try (ie the lazy comment) or have no interest in language (ignoramuses). To decide to change everything to please a small group of people who can't be assed learning the most basic things necessary to function in our society is, as I said, arrogant. What's more it's completely moronic.

Don't take it out on me that your brilliant idea has been shot down by everyone who answered.

There you go insulting other people again. Can you think of any advantages of having difficult to spell words? Besides puns, as Luna mentioned. I do not want a rehash of your concerns with words being spelled the same either. If having them sound the same hampers verbal communication none, why would having them spelled the same hurt written communication? You have not commented on all of the times the exact thing I am talking about has been done all over the world either. You said it was impossible to do, and I thought the revelation that other countries successfully decided to get as many people engaged in society as possible would shock you.

I also see you are still having trouble with math. You use language to communicate pertinent data, how to preform mathematical operations and display the results. If you have two shiny pebbles and you find two more then you have four pebbles. Notice how the only language involved in that was me describing the scene? That is because the symbols most people think of as math is really just its language wrapper. The agreed upon rules are just how people talk about math and share math related things. If life had never evolved in the universe then

would still be

. You do not communicate with math, you communicate with language. Nobody can sit quietly in a chair doing math in their head and expect to communicate more than a person quietly sitting in a chair not doing math in their head.

 

[Jupiter551]

Well, congratulations on taking a complex example like 2+2 = 4. Please explain to me the constancy of Euclidean geometry in curved space.

As to arguments not to change the language - I don't need any. You're the one who wants it changed, the onus is on you to convince people. You're not there yet.

 

[Shaun__]

Well, congratulations on taking a complex example like 2+2 = 4. Please explain to me the constancy of Euclidean geometry in curved space.

As to arguments not to change the language - I don't need any. You're the one who wants it changed, the onus is on you to convince people. You're not there yet.

I am not trying to convince people to do it. I just think it is a good idea, because it would lower the entry point to a bigger world for potentially millions of people in my country. I also think switching to the metric system is a good idea, it is getting a little embarrassing to not be using it at this point. I would like a single payer healthcare system. I think a parliament might be nice. That numbered voting thing I think someone said Australia has, you know where you rank the people running by preference, sounds fucking awesome as hell. I also really hate daylight saving time so I would be ecstatic if it could be done away with. Customs and traditions don't mean jack shit to me, so I would also get rid of that genocidal rapist Columbus's holiday and give it to someone better like George Washington Carver 'cause helped make agriculture in America what it is today.

Plot a graph on a piece of paper and the curl it up, that is as close to Euclidean geometry in curved space as you can get I think. The paper still thinks it is flat, but as an outside observer on a higher dimension you can see the curve.

 

[Jupiter551]

Okay, but you're saying it's because spelling is hard? I'm saying it's because there's insuffient education. By the logic of the study you pointed out that people can read as long as the first and last letters are the same, the majority of the words you want to change would currently be readable by anyone who could read your simplified system no? Reading is about learning letters and how they sound, anyone who has the basics can pretty much work out the rest themselves by spelling the letters out in their head in most cases. Simply being unable to read is a situation where you can't recognise the letters or the sounds they make together and no amount of phonetic spelling is going to fix that.

 

[Shaun__]

Okay, but you're saying it's because spelling is hard? I'm saying it's because there's insuffient education. By the logic of the study you pointed out that people can read as long as the first and last letters are the same, the majority of the words you want to change would currently be readable by anyone who could read your simplified system no? Reading is about learning letters and how they sound, anyone who has the basics can pretty much work out the rest themselves by spelling the letters out in their head in most cases. Simply being unable to read is a situation where you can't recognise the letters or the sounds they make together and no amount of phonetic spelling is going to fix that.

Ignore the illiterate number as large as the population of Canada for now, and look at the below fifth grade level number the size of the United Kingdom's population. That is the target group of spelling simplification. My theory is that if the most common words were all phonetically spelled those people would be as functional as an average person maybe. Spelling and reading just looks easy to you, but it is because you know how to do it already. That misspelled paragraph I posted would have been gibberish to an under skilled person. Subtlety, colonel, lingerie, segue, jealousy, knackered, flower, flour, knit are all words the both of us despite never having been seen before, except for fucking colonel which is just fucking wrong in so many ways kûrnl my ass, could have probably read. Other people are not so fortunate. They may have learning disabilities or other issues, but I see no good reason to make it any harder on them than it has to be. Saying sixty million people need more education is not going to solve anything, and is not a practical thing to even try in my eyes. Most of them are shamed by it, and would not go back to class out of fear of people learning even if it was possible with work and children.

 

[Nordling]

I'd say that of the illiterate population, spelling conventions is not the problem. Some simply have learning disabilities that are beyond our current education system. The rest are people who simply haven't had the benefit of the education system as it stands. People don't drop out because of how things are spelled.

Think of Asians--Japenese and Chinese, e.g. They have to memorize a bazillion special characters to form words from. They seem to do pretty well.

 

[Shaun__]

I'd say that of the illiterate population, spelling conventions is not the problem. Some simply have learning disabilities that are beyond our current education system. The rest are people who simply haven't had the benefit of the education system as it stands. People don't drop out because of how things are spelled.

Think of Asians--Japenese and Chinese, e.g. They have to memorize a bazillion special characters to form words from. They seem to do pretty well.

I hope that they would be able to self teach if the words were easier.

 

[Nordling]

People who can self-teach, don't need simplified spelling.

 

[Shaun__]

People who can self-teach, don't need simplified spelling.

They cannot do it at the current level, because lots of spelling makes no logical sense if looked at as a stand alone word. People who learned the old spelling can go about there business same as always, and would notice little in the way of change. Their brain would ignore most of the changes. Other people though would be able to sound out the word one syllable at a time. Once they said it out loud they probably already know it. Kids already prewired to be good readers like me, would chew up the new methods and could be placed in accelerated classes.

Technical job related terminology would stay largely untouched, because the goal is a realistic one of nudging people's peoples reading skills up to a high school one over a period of time. There would be reprints of popular books in a simpler spelled version, similar to how abridged versions exists today. You are not going to lose Sherlock Holmes you will just see several versions of the e-book to pick from. Kids with the motivation to read old school Treasure Island would just have to do it the way I did as a small child, with a dictionary.

Those kids who do spelling bees often have tens of thousands of flash cards with words, and are unlikely to notice to the loss of a few hundred at first building to a few thousand at the end. Kids skilled enough to go to a foreign college should be more than capable of learning multiple ways to spell. In other words the people doing fine today will still be doing fine, but other people may be given a little boost in the future.

 

[Nordling]

It sounds like you're suggesting something that 1. will never happen and 2. even if it did, it would not help anything (see my example of how people in parts of Asia read).

Language, including spelling, is a cultural phenomenon, it's isn't something like a Ford Pinto that you can modify at will. I'd say improving the quality of public education is a much better way of approaching illiteracy.

 

[LadyLuna]

Shaun, I almost see your point. The problem here is, those with learning disabilities are still not going to be able to read.

No amount of changing the spelling is going to help a dyslexic person read better. No amount of changing the spelling is going to help someone who has never heard the words they are reading before. How did I read words that I'd never had sounded out for me before? I sounded it out, and figured out what word I knew about did it sound like. If I'd never heard it before, then I asked someone, because I never could figure out the dictionary pronunciation guides.

People who read on a 5th-grade level have only had conversations on a 5-grade level. That's why their reading is low- they're not used to interacting with the words in the spoken form, let alone the written. They don't have problems with words like numb and knife. They have problems with words like phonetics, enumerate, and placebo. Why do they have problems with phonetics? They get as far as phone, and tics is really easy, so at the worst they should get phone-ticks. Know what they come up with? Some fucked up shit where you're wondering how they put a g in there. How do I know this? I worked with teaching kids how to read. It was part of my teacher training.

If you want to teach people how to spell better, you have to expose them to more words. Instead of dumbing down the spelling, we need to smarten up the tv. Throw words in sitcoms with more than a couple syllables on a regular basis. Have words like stratosphere come up in casual conversation in the media, and you can bet that the reading level is going to improve dramatically.

If you watch the older shows compared to today's shows, you'll see that the words were dumbed down in tv right before the country's reading levels started dropping.

 

[SweepTheLeg]

Unfortunately the tv shows where there's a vast vocabulary used with words not so commonly used will be canceled soon after because the average person is more likely to change the channel as opposed to look up and find out what those words mean. TV dumbed down, because the average viewer wants to watch dumb tv.

 

[HiGirlsRHot]

Honestly, I kinda like the fact that English has such weird spellings. It leads to puns, and I like puns.

Well other languages have puns (not that I can tell you one.) The other cool about weird spelling is it leads to a spelling bees. It is fun to watch the home schooled 6th through 8th graders, who's parents are typically immigrants, beat the crap out of the kids from top schools. It is pretty pointless to have a spelling bees for languages with regular spellings.

 

[Shaun__]

It sounds like you're suggesting something that 1. will never happen and 2. even if it did, it would not help anything (see my example of how people in parts of Asia read).

Language, including spelling, is a cultural phenomenon, it's isn't something like a Ford Pinto that you can modify at will. I'd say improving the quality of public education is a much better way of approaching illiteracy.

You are still ignoring that it has been done many times with many languages, including English in America at least twice with partial success. You can say there is no widespread desire to do or no money to do it, but you can not say it can not be done.

 

[Nordling]

It sounds like you're suggesting something that 1. will never happen and 2. even if it did, it would not help anything (see my example of how people in parts of Asia read).

Language, including spelling, is a cultural phenomenon, it's isn't something like a Ford Pinto that you can modify at will. I'd say improving the quality of public education is a much better way of approaching illiteracy.

You are still ignoring that it has been done many times with many languages, including English in America at least twice with partial success. You can say there is no widespread desire to do or no money to do it, but you can not say it can not be done.

No, I've even mentioned Noah Webster. His changes were really very minor and was only partly successful--and during a period when standardized spelling wasn't nearly as strongly expressed as it is now.

 

[Shaun__]

No, I've even mentioned Noah Webster. His changes were really very minor and was only partly successful--and during a period when standardized spelling wasn't nearly as strongly expressed as it is now.

I found you an example of spelling reform that includes a timeline. As you can see it has been an ongoing process for over a century. It may not technically be legal what they did, but it seems like it is working. Like all language reforms the biggest opponents seem to be people who do not need it, people who like having to spell the same word differently depending on the country you are in, those who do not want anything to change, people who are worried about no longer being able to tell the history of a word by looking at the extra unused letters in it, and people saying no one knows how much it will cost.

It is possible to do this it just takes time.

Link to wiki
Link to petition opposing the reforms and calling them illegal. Written in Portuguese

 

[Nordling]

I'm all for "spelling reform." I'd love to see English standardized across all English-speaking countries. But I'm not going to make a big deal about it--I'm probably in a minority.

 

[Jupiter551]

No, I've even mentioned Noah Webster. His changes were really very minor and was only partly successful--and during a period when standardized spelling wasn't nearly as strongly expressed as it is now.

I found you an example of spelling reform that includes a timeline. As you can see it has been an ongoing process for over a century. It may not technically be legal what they did, but it seems like it is working. Like all language reforms the biggest opponents seem to be people who do not need it, people who like having to spell the same word differently depending on the country you are in, those who do not want anything to change, people who are worried about no longer being able to tell the history of a word by looking at the extra unused letters in it, and people saying no one knows how much it will cost.

It is possible to do this it just takes time.

Link to wiki
Link to petition opposing the reforms and calling them illegal. Written in Portuguese

TBH, from that timeline Brazil comes off as an annoying busybody who bugs everyone else with reform after reform until they probably agree to just about anything lol

 

[Nordling]

Reality.

A government starts a program of language reform--it goes on for many years until a new generation gains power who think there are better things to do... the words that had been reformed look silly against the glare of conventional spelling and society attempts to go back to the old way... this too fails...

The result is that the language evolves, unsimplified but simply different than how it would have been if the government had done nothing. Money spent, lives wasted...

Language move on in its own cumbersome way.

 

[Shaun__]

Reality.

A government starts a program of language reform--it goes on for many years until a new generation gains power who think there are better things to do... the words that had been reformed look silly against the glare of conventional spelling and society attempts to go back to the old way... this too fails...

The result is that the language evolves, unsimplified but simply different than how it would have been if the government had done nothing. Money spent, lives wasted...

Language move on in its own cumbersome way.

What I posted was reality, and what you posted is your personal opinion.

 

[Nordling]

Reality.

A government starts a program of language reform--it goes on for many years until a new generation gains power who think there are better things to do... the words that had been reformed look silly against the glare of conventional spelling and society attempts to go back to the old way... this too fails...

The result is that the language evolves, unsimplified but simply different than how it would have been if the government had done nothing. Money spent, lives wasted...

Language move on in its own cumbersome way.

What I posted was reality, and what you posted is your personal opinion.

Reality? No, you posted a time-line of attempts by various Portuguese governments to standardize spelling. Without knowing how messy Portuguese was prior to the reforms, there's no way I can judge how badly the reforms were needed. If the language was nearing anarchy, then yes, the reforms were necessary and may even be of some success.

English lacks any such possible problems. We standardized spelling a long time ago, as did Britain, and I assume other English-speaking countries. But what I perceive you're suggesting is a much more radical reform--one that would probably be met with more resistance than conversion to the metric system. (the first time we tried to go metric was sometime around the time of the revolution...and was met with violence.) lol

 

[Jupiter551]

Reality.

A government starts a program of language reform--it goes on for many years until a new generation gains power who think there are better things to do... the words that had been reformed look silly against the glare of conventional spelling and society attempts to go back to the old way... this too fails...

The result is that the language evolves, unsimplified but simply different than how it would have been if the government had done nothing. Money spent, lives wasted...

Language move on in its own cumbersome way.

What I posted was reality, and what you posted is your personal opinion.

You don't see the number of times they had to meet over almost a century to be indicative of how difficult it must be/have been to implement changes that they had to keep trying time after time?

Here, I just pasted this from wikipedia:

Obstacles and criticisms

There are a number of barriers in the development and implementation of a reformed orthography for English:
Public resistance to spelling reform has been consistently strong, at least since the early 19th century, when spelling was codified by the influential English dictionaries of Samuel Johnson (1755) and Noah Webster (1806).
English vocabulary is mostly a melding of Germanic, French, Latin and Greek words, which have very different phonemes and approaches to spelling. Some reform proposals tend to favor one approach over the other, resulting in a large percentage of words that must change spelling to fit the new scheme.
The great number of vowel sounds in English and the small number of vowel letters make phonemic spelling difficult to achieve. This is especially true for the three vowels /uː/ (e.g.: fume, moon), /ʌ/ (e.g.: blood, sun) and /ʊ/ (e.g.: look, put) which are represented in English by only two symbols, oo and u. Spelling these phonemically cannot be done without resorting to odd letter combinations, diacritic marks, or new letters.[29]
Some inflections are pronounced differently in different words. For example, plural -s and possessive -'s are both pronounced differently in cat(')s (/s/) and dog(')s (/z/). The handling of this particular difficulty distinguishes morphemic proposals, which tend to spell such inflectional endings the same, from phonemic proposals that spell the endings according to their pronunciation.
English is the only one of the top ten major languages that lacks a worldwide regulatory body with the power to promulgate spelling changes. Such a body may need to be set-up before any worldwide co-ordinated reform can be undertaken.
The spellings of some words – such as tongue and stomach – are so unindicative of their pronunciation that changing the spelling would noticeably change the shape of the word. Likewise, the irregular spelling of very common words such as is, are, have, done and of makes it difficult to fix them without introducing a noticeable change to the appearance of English text. This would create acceptance issues.
Spelling reform may make pre-reform writings harder to understand and read in their original form, often necessitating transcription and republication. Today, few people choose to read old literature in the original spellings as most of it has been republished in modern spellings.[30]
[edit]Writing conveys meaning, not phonemes
The main criticism of many purely phonemic reform proposals is that written language is not a purely phonemic analog of the spoken word. While reformers might argue that the units of understanding are phonemes, critics argue that the basic units are instead words. Some of the most phonemic spelling reform proposals might re-spell closely related words less alike than they are spelt now, such as electric, electricity and electrician, or (with full vowel reform) photo, photograph and photography.
[edit]Cognates in other languages
English is a West Germanic language that has borrowed many words from non-Germanic languages, and the spelling of a word often reflects its origin. This sometimes gives a clue as to the meaning of the word. Even if their pronunciation has strayed from the original pronunciation, the spelling is a record of the phoneme. The same is true for words from Germanic whose current spelling still resembles its cognates in other Germanic languages. Examples include light/German Licht, knight/ German Knecht; ocean/French océan, occasion/French occasion. Critics argue that re-spelling such words could hide those links.[31]
Spelling reformers argue that, although some of these links may be hidden by a reform, others would become more noticeable. For example, Axel Wijk's 1959 proposal Regularized English proposed changing height to hight which would link it more closely to the related word high.
In some cases, English spelling of foreign words has diverged from the current spellings of those words in the original languages, such as the spelling of connoisseur that is now spelled connaisseur in French after a French-language spelling reform in the 19th century.
Language Word Original English
French ponch punch (drink)
Japanese heddohon headphone
Japanese takushi taxi
The orthographies of other languages do not pay special attention to preserving similar links to loanwords. English loanwords in other languages are commonly assimilated to the orthographical conventions of those languages and so such words have a variety of spellings that are sometimes difficult to recognise as English words. See the table for examples.
[edit]Whose accent?
Another criticism is that a reform might favor one dialect or pronunciation over others. Some words have more than one acceptable pronunciation, regardless of dialect (e.g. economic, either). Some distinctions in regional accents are still marked in spelling. Examples include the distinguishing of fern, fir and fur that is maintained in Irish and Scottish English or the distinction between toe and tow that is maintained in a few regional dialects in England.
Reformers point-out that current English spelling sometimes favors one dialect or pronunciation over others. For example, the first syllable in simultaneously can be pronounced like the first syllable in simple (/sɪ/) or like the first syllable in cycle (/saɪ/), but current spelling favors the former. Reformers point out that a spelling reform would only affect how we spell words, not how we say them. After a reform, English would still allow multiple pronunciations of a standard spelling, as it has always done. Some reformers also suggest that a reform could actually make spelling more inclusive of regional dialects by allowing more spellings for such words.
[edit]False friends
Some reform proposals try to make too many spelling changes at once and do not allow for any transitional period where the old spellings and the new may be in use together. The problem is an overlap in words, where a particular word could be an unreformed spelling of one word or a reformed spelling of another, akin to false friends when learning a foreign language.
For example, a reform could re-spell wonder as wunder and wander as wonder. However, both cannot be done at once because this causes ambiguity. During any transitional period, is wonder the unreformed spelling of wonder or the reformed spelling of wander? This could be resolved by using the old wander with the new wunder. Other similar chains of words are device → devise → *devize, warm → worm → *wurm and rice → rise → *rize.
Reformers argue that, even if this cannot be resolved, the resulting confusion would be less than what we suffer under today's spelling system, and furthermore, would be only temporary.

 

[Nordling]

A few months ago, I also read about a group of English speakers in Europe and the UK that want to "de-Latinize" English. They wish to purge all Latin-based words from common English and take it back to its Nordic roots. Their success is probably along the lines of The Flat Earth Society.

 

[Shaun__]

Reality? No, you posted a time-line of attempts by various Portuguese governments to standardize spelling. Without knowing how messy Portuguese was prior to the reforms, there's no way I can judge how badly the reforms were needed. If the language was nearing anarchy, then yes, the reforms were necessary and may even be of some success.

English lacks any such possible problems. We standardized spelling a long time ago, as did Britain, and I assume other English-speaking countries. But what I perceive you're suggesting is a much more radical reform--one that would probably be met with more resistance than conversion to the metric system. (the first time we tried to go metric was sometime around the time of the revolution...and was met with violence.) lol

Portuguese spelling was standardized in the 1600s, so it was about the same age as modern English is today when they began. Most scholars consider modern English to start around the 1700s. There is not a hundred percent agreement on its age of course.

You perceive wrongly about what I want as well. I want to change the most frequently used words not the entire language like happened with Portuguese. I do not know if anything, but the passing of time, can grind down English to a completely new form. Especially in America, we seem to have large amounts of inertia for some reason. Which is why we have ugly paper money, do not have universal healthcare, still use pennies that cost more than a penny to make, do not widely use the metric system, and so many other things.

Jupiter's post did finally explain why tongue has survived two attempts to change it. So words like that may just have to be left alone, but other do not have those same issues.

You don't see the number of times they had to meet over almost a century to be indicative of how difficult it must be/have been to implement changes that they had to keep trying time after time?

Who says things have to be easy to be worth doing? Curing things like cancer and AIDS seems to be very difficult, but I do not think that means it should not be attempted. If you look at the petition I linked to you will see a lot of overlap with your post. I doubt we will ever agree on which negative points may be valid, just looking at a similar argument I remember having in another thread. The points I noticed you making in that thread follow you around on this forum, so I think you honestly believe them and that you were not just using them to be argumentative.

 

[Jupiter551]

You don't see the number of times they had to meet over almost a century to be indicative of how difficult it must be/have been to implement changes that they had to keep trying time after time?

Who says things have to be easy to be worth doing? Curing things like cancer and AIDS seems to be very difficult, but I do not think that means it should not be attempted. If you look at the petition I linked to you will see a lot of overlap with your post. I doubt we will ever agree on which negative points may be valid, just looking at a similar argument I remember having in another thread. The points I noticed you making in that thread follow you around on this forum, so I think you honestly believe them and that you were not just using them to be argumentative.

Well unlike AIDS or cancer cures, spelling standardisation isn't really that hard to do except it requires everyone to go along with it - that's the hard part.

 

[LadyLuna]

warm → worm → wurm

This made me shudder. I know too many people who pronounced warm as wurm.

I think the biggest point is- whose pronunciation would we go by? If you go by New England, butter will become budder. But what about all those people who pronounce it butter? And if you take away a t, then the u becomes the u sound, and you get byu-ter for the pronunciation.

If they want to change the American spelling, the first thing they're going to have to do is standardize American pronunciation. Then, they'll have to either add accents or create letters to take the place of all those pesky vowel sounds. (Personally, I'd LOVE it!) Then they can start messing with the consonants, because the way the letters in the word interact with one another to clue a reader into pronunciation is half of why the spelling of our language looks like hodge-podge.

I say, leave it be!

 

[Shaun__]

warm → worm → wurm

This made me shudder. I know too many people who pronounced warm as wurm.

I think the biggest point is- whose pronunciation would we go by? If you go by New England, butter will become budder. But what about all those people who pronounce it butter? And if you take away a t, then the u becomes the u sound, and you get byu-ter for the pronunciation.

If they want to change the American spelling, the first thing they're going to have to do is standardize American pronunciation. Then, they'll have to either add accents or create letters to take the place of all those pesky vowel sounds. (Personally, I'd LOVE it!) Then they can start messing with the consonants, because the way the letters in the word interact with one another to clue a reader into pronunciation is half of why the spelling of our language looks like hodge-podge.

I say, leave it be!

Questions like that would have to be solved by people more intelligent than me about this issue. You have however started me wondering if regional dialects will change as the internet becomes more integrated in our lives. Will talking to other children in another country over programs like Skype change things? Not over night, but over several generations.

 

[Nordling]

Decades ago, I figured the use of "western US standard" English by national network announcers and others would lead to everyone speaking western US standard. I haven't noticed this happening, and I doubt if the internet will do it either. For one thing, we don't know where the internet will eventually lead us...

Possibly, in the distant future (lol like 10 or 20 years) the internet will become "tribalized" with different kinds of folks banding together and creating each their own dialects.