jlk7e (John Kenny) wrote in part:
To get in on this wonderful debate, can I say that RK and Stevertigo are both full of it?
We're trying to practise WikiLove here, even if all of us feel the same way privately.
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.
And what impositions by unnatural means have occured weren't always so great! They put the silent "S" back in "isle" (where it hadn't been missed) -- and at the same time put one in "island" that had never before existed. Then Webster changed "-ise" to "-ize", putting the United States out of step with every other English speaking country, while failing to (as he wanted) phoneticise the usage of "s" (instead just switching one rule for another).
In any event, how would any mass spelling revision even come about?
Webster tried, but he was only able to affect one country. Shaw tried, but he wasn't able to affect anybody permanently. LittleDan may try with a decentralised approach -- we'll see how well he does.
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 main point (IMO) of the accusers of cultural imperialism is that the variations over the centuries have been much greater! This is true even in the written language, but more so in the spoken, and that a language hasn't been written down much before is little argument against writing it now (see [[nds:]] aka [[za:]]). Bangladeshi dialect would qualify here -- they learn this natively and are hardly making *mistakes*.
Now, there's a question as to whether what JTDirl was *originally* complaining about is this, or ESL users that *are* making mistakes. But this is, I think, what SV and RK are arguing about *now*.
As for Wikipedia, I still believe that every participant in this debate is changing things to standard, internationally understood written forms (sometimes even changing one standard form to another, which is OK too). So interesting as the debate is, I doubt that it'll have any impact on Wikipedia!
-- Toby