this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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To the spelling point: The world, for the most part, has moved away from the grammarian tradition of the 19th and 20th century of having a handful of dictionary makers decide what English is proper and what isn't - the language evolves on its own, and if a misspelling becomes popular enough, it becomes a proper spelling. For example, facade is a french word, spelled façade, the accent under the C means it's pronounced like an S. We dropped it in English because we don't use accents in English, and now we spell it facade. It's a "misspelling", but you've probably never spelled it correctly. The language was never consistent to begin with, pretending you can fix spelling to make it so is a fool's errand.
I disagree that it's a fools errand. Misspellings rarely become popular enough to become "proper" because we teach everyone the "proper" spelling and we have spell checkers on our computers that are used for virtually everything.
There's no method for the people speaking the English language to put pressure on a word that already exists because we've build up this infrastructure to "lock things in' and insist that "they've been this way so they must continue to be this way." The only way we get language evolution currently is via slang ... which is hardly a way to get a better language.
I know the history of facade, it's like many other words we've stolen from other languages that don't make a lick of sense in our alphabet. It's not an infinite list, it's fixable, but we need to change the mind share that "it has to be this way."
We made up official spellings, we can fix them, they're not an immutable law of nature.
The fool's errand is trying to make the language consistent, when it never has been, especially trying to do it via spelling. English isn't consistent. It's not supposed to be. It takes pieces from every other language and integrates them into English whether it makes sense to or not, leading to inconsistency. That inconsistency, I think, is by design. It makes the language more versatile than any other, a "good enough" medium of communication for everything, but usually not the best, which for communication, tends to be fine.
The old "why try to do anything because it will never be perfect" argument never holds water.
That's not at all the argument I'm making. My argument is that English's inconsistency is, at this point, the reason it is successful. By integrating everything into it, it has become a good enough medium of communication for almost everything. That would not have been possible unless the language eschewed consistency.
Really, a better argument against changing the spelling is the classic "standards" xkcd, where now you're just making another dialect of English where they spell words differently again, and now it needs to be adopted, fracturing the language further. Honestly, though? It doesn't matter. Fix the spelling if you want. English can take the fracturing. The changes might take, they might not, but I doubt it'll make the language more consistent overall, for every fix you put in, you'll have someone who disagrees and doesn't put it in, making your dialect more consistent, but the language overall less so, but it doesn't matter. English will continue to be inconsistent, and that's okay, that's why it works.
Except that's not at all what we've done.
The only reason English dominates is because it's the dominant language of the world super powers following world war II. It's not because of some special design, principle, or properties.
English isn't just "make up whatever rules and put them wherever", particularly formal English which is what we're talking about in the context of education.
Language will evolve with or without direction. We have the structure in the form of schools to actually evolve it with direction in the name of making things more consistent and intuitive. We should use it, that's all.