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)