Original link: https://headsalon.org/archives/9067.html
【2022-03-27】
@KIMKILLS New English movement hard not to support https://ift.tt/X92AcMs
@whigzhou: That’s how the languages of those non-literate tribes were first recorded by anthropologists, do you want English to degenerate to this level?
@whigzhou: The scheme of pursuing sound-form consistency has been proposed many times, but they did not understand: a core advantage of written language is that it lags behind phonetic drift
@whigzhou: English (or any other language) would quickly split into a large number of sub-languages if the written language always followed the spoken language, and would never become a global lingua franca
@whigzhou: In the scheme of consistent sound and shape, there will be a large number of homophonic and homonymous words, and once the means of *discriminating meaning with form* is lost, the expressiveness of written language will be greatly weakened, and the ability to absorb new words will be extremely limited
@whigzhou: The most interesting thing is that the stability of written language not only benefits the readers, but also the oral listeners, because it anchors the pronunciation of vocabulary in a relatively stable range, and makes it easier for people with different accents It is easy to guess which word the other person is saying
@Shu20060273: It’s not that exaggerated, English is a polysyllabic text, and it’s not like Chinese. Besides, the spelling of English has been standardized many times in history. The most recent large-scale revision was when Webster’s dictionary was compiled. This is why some words are spelled differently in American English than in British
@whigzhou: The lexicographical movement of the 18th/19th century was part of the writing process, don’t you think how stable the spelling of English words has been since then?
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