[WikiEN-l] This is the English Wikipedia

[jlk7e at juno.com]

To get in on this wonderful debate, can I say that RK and Stevertigo are both full of it?

In particular, phonetic spelling is never going to come and is, in my opinion, not particularly desirable.  It would, among other things, make any older book ultimately unreadable.  English came to its current (relatively) standardized orthography by a lengthy process of natural development, for the most part.  Further, I'd say that spelling is surely one of the least difficult parts of learning a foreign language.  The process of foreign language learning (as opposed to learning one's own native language) is geared towards seeing the words in print, and I'd say I'm probably considerably less likely to misspell words in French or German than I am in English, simply because I associate French and German words at least as much with what they look like in print as with what they sound like.  And French words are at least as non-phonetically spelled as English words, although the pronunciations associated with the non-phoneticness in French is probably more standard than in English.

In any event, how would any mass spelling revision even come about?  

In any event, the issue of spelling really has very little to do with the initial question, which had more to do with grammar (and with wikipedia, even!).  And I genuinely don't understand the argument that using correct grammar is somehow cultural imperialism.  Like spelling, English grammar rules evolved over centuries, and have, for the most part, been followed in written language (with some variations, as who/whom problems, for instance).  The fact that somebody who has learned English as a second language does not know how to properly express an idea in English suggests to me that it ought to be corrected, not that somehow us native English-speakers are exercising our cultural hegemony over non-native English speakers.  Personally, I wouldn't mind if a native French speaker exerted their cultural hegemony over a hypothetical effort on my part to write something in French by correcting improper grammar (and word use, perhaps).  In fact, I would hope that that would be done.  I don't see how having articles written in some kind of pidgin would have any value over being written in proper English.  Would the incorrect English written by a native speaker of Chinese be more or less intelligible to a native speaker of Russian than correct English?  I don't see why the former would be, at the very least.

In any event, I shall maintain my ridiculously Burkean views on this subject against all you linguistic Jacobins.  

best,

John Kenney (jlk7e)