I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;)
There are specific subsets of English that are used in certain domains that have standards bodies behind them, like Simplified Technical English for aviation. It even has a working group! [0]
VOA also have a Learning English spec for broadcast english [1] but that seems to be a lot looser of a spec.
So it's definitely not impossible. The funny thing, is I remember being told in grade school that in English Canada, I was to write numbers with a space as the thousands separator. `$10 000.00`, instead of `$10,000.00`. This is because french Canada uses a comma as a decimal point, `10 000.00 $`, so a space is non ambiguous. I have rarely ever seen the English space format in use here. I don't think English speakers would respect any authority if it wasn't as domain-scoped as Aviation or Learning english.
FWIW while comma vs period for decimal fractions is a point of significant variability globally, the use of comma to group digits is fairly uncommon, whereas period is universally understood as a decimal separator even in countries where comma is normally used for that purpose (thanks to calculators and computers). And, on the other hand, space-separated groups are self-explanatory for those used to comma for that purpose. So using spaces for grouping + period for fractions is indeed the way to go to maximum readability worldwide.
The use of a space as a thousands separator has been around since the 1940s as recommended by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and it was what we used when I was a kid at school in the UK. They specified it should be a thin (half) space.
No I know, it's also part of the French standard. Just more so commenting on how uncommon it is from Canadian English speakers despite it being the Canadian English "standard" recommend by a Canadian entity similar to the French or German standards bodies.
It's interesting now to see more and more programming languages using an underscore as the thousands separator to allow for easier reading without trying to get into a mess of commas or full-stops as separators.
The beauty of English is that it is controlled by the speakers and not by some pompous authority. It's even flexible enough to allow for regional differences, which allows my fellow Americans and I to spell words correctly like color and theater.
>It's even flexible enough to allow for regional differences, which allows my fellow Americans and I to spell words correctly like color and theater.
As I recall, the American spelling of color and other words like that was actually dictated by a "pompous authority", namely Noah Webster, who wrote the dictionary bearing his name. He wanted to simplify some spellings he saw as overly complicated. I happen to agree with him, but this wasn't because of regular, everyday people in different regions.
The Académie has no authority whatsoever, it's little more than a club for writers. The Education Ministry has authority for school programs and what is accepted in French language classes, but only in France. It only ever allows new uses, never forbids previously allowed things.
The OQLF (and French language Ministry) has a broader authority within Québec, but only for Québec.
The Ministry of Culture has some authority within the Brussels-Wallonia federation but it's quite limited.
No idea what it's like in Switzerland.
But there is no global authority for the French language (unlike German or Dutch for example). The language evolves by consensus.
You do realize that what people actually speak (in France) differs quite a bit from the Académie Française. email vs. courriel for example is a good one, but you'll stand out in most places if you don't know l'argot (slang).
I don't think an English standardization would change much in how people actually speak.
Well, loanwords is slightly different that completely inconsistent spelling - wouldn't you say?
Imagine some would stick with original "bonjour" (Qubec), other more progressive would simplify to "bojur" and whatnote.
You have the same with "colour" and "color". Or "night" and "nite". From my observatio where you have some language authority there is at least consisten spelling (and english spelling is all over the place)
Besides, in case of Spanish the spelling is more uniform. Aforementioned locales are mostly for GUIs and regional wording differences. And the thread started with "unifying english spelling" which is just a mess…
> I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;)
That's even less likely now than in the past, with the elite cultural trends in English-speaking countries favoring the adoption of foreign spellings and pronunciation. That just piles on the complexity to unmanageable levels.
IMHO, for instance, there's no excuse for the requirement that English newspaper readers know Pinyin [1], rather than some more English-friendly romanization system, to be able to read news about China, when Chinese speakers themselves use a completely different, non-roman writing system. What's next, just printing the Chinese characters without romanization? Pinyin has its uses, but writing things out for foreigners is not something it does well.
[1] which gives many letters very unexpected values (e.g. c = ts) and many vowels are impossible for an English-speaker to guess correctly.
"c" for "ts" has a very long history in Latin script - pretty much all Slavic languages and many other Eastern European languages that use Latin use it in this manner, as does German in many cases. That's why it also has this meaning in Esperanto.
I do agree that the currently dominant English convention of adopting spelling from other languages (or their standard Romanization system) as is - or worse yet, dropping all the diacritics but keeping everything else as is - is misguided. But it doesn't help that English spelling can get very unwieldy when trying to spell something phonetically, especially across many dialects of English due to considerable variability in how things are pronounced. This has also caused problems - for an example of that, look at the still-common Korean Romanization of names such as "Park" which does not accurately represent the actual pronunciation if you pronounce it as an American would ("r" is silent - it reflects the non-rhotic British pronunciation, and was put there because the more straightforward "Pak" would tend to be pronounced incorrectly by a Brit).
There are basically political reasons for this. Wade-Giles is associated with Taiwan, and is in fact mostly used when referring to Taiwanese subjects, I've always seen Kaohsiung for the city, never Gāoxióng.
The Mainlanders would find it very insulting to not use Pinyin when referring to subjects in the PRC, so understandably, American journalism goes along with that.
For what it's worth I think both systems have different disadvantages, in that neither does a good job of reflecting the actual pronunciation of Guoyu. Excuse me, Putonghua. Doing so with the English character set isn't actually possible.
It's not the character set that's the problem so much so as the set of phonemes. English just doesn't have the ʂ/ɕ distinction, and no amount of creative spelling choices can fix that. Other things are much more straightforward, tones aside.
For what it's worth CJK countries tend to give less weight to how foreign names are pronounced.
For instance the current PRC secretary name is pronounced accordingly to the characters' reading in Taiwan and Japan, and won't have much in common. Same way Chinese people will read Japanese name as the characters sound to them, without referring to the actual Japanese reading, even if in Japan these names have a designated original reading.
> Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script.
It's pretty good for Mandarin speakers. It's terrible for English speakers.
> Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”?
English friendly is something that will produce reasonably-close approximate pronunciations by an English reader without any extra foreign-language training. Basically, something that prioritizes following existing English orthography (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language.
Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations.
I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
>Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations.
How could it? English is not a tonal language at all, so how could you possibly represent tonality with Latin characters, in a way that English speakers with no extra training could read such text and pronounce the Chinese word in an acceptable way? I don't think it's possible. It's just like trying to use Japanese characters to represent English names: a LOT is lost in translation, because there's simply no way to represent all English sounds in Japanese, since Japanese has far fewer possible sounds than English.
>It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
But it's not, English is, like it or not. If you want to communicate with someone in any random country in the world, you have a very good chance of doing so if you speak English, regardless of your or the listener's native language. The same isn't true for Mandarin.
> I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
It's not an issue of cultural dominance, as no one would be forcing the Chinese to change their names or their pronunciations. It's basically just keeping English from being even more unmanageable, in a way many other languages do, including Chinese.
If an English name or other word is used in Chinese (or in Japanese, or many other languages) it gets localized. For instance, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2xYvMcW2A. The Chinese speakers are mostly talking about Trump, but the only name I could actually pick out was Obama's (probably because "Trump" is hard to pronounce in Chinese).
Also, the English use of Pinyin can have some unfortunate effects. I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" almost 100% of the time (there was a strong preference for first-name use in the office, so it rarely happened to his face).
> Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us."
Consider a rather unusual (but real nevertheless) Polish surname: «Brzęczyszczykiewicz». Most native English speakers, who are not well known for their patience with long and unusually looking non-native surnames, will instantly give up and shorten it to a mere «B». The most daring and adventurous ones will persevere and will likely arrive at something akin to «Brenshistishkevich», which is neither correct nor easily pronounceable for an English speaker anyway. The few English speakers who are acquainted with Polish, would render and pronounce «Brzęczyszczykiewicz» as «Bzhenchishchikyevich» which is closer to truth, yet it will confuse everyone else who will stick with «Brenshistishkevich» anyway.
Or consider an Icelandic surname of «Þórðarson». We would have «Thordarson» (as a naïve take) or «Thortharson» (somewhat closer to the actual Icelandic version).
Bonus point: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a Welsh surname, with the «colloquial» vocalisation of «Lanfarpwilgwingle» vs «Hlan-fair-pool-gwin-gith» (a more truthful rendition).
In all cases, with Brenshistishkevich, Thordarson and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, we have arrived at the English equivalent of Te Lang Pu (Trump). In fact, there is no need to look at more extreme cases, it will suffice to consider a simple Vietnamese name of «Huy», which most English speakers will pronounce as «Hughey» whereas it is actually «Hwee» – it is still the case of the English Te Lang Pu.
In the case of Mandarin Chinese, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Chinese writing script is logographic and can't encode single consonants (single sounds in general, although there are Chinese characters that encode vowelled words, usually exclamations). Secondly (or firstly, in fact), all Chinese languages have a strict rule of a phoneme having the CV(C) structure (Consonant-Vowel(maybe another Consonant)), which makes the CCVCC (i.e. Trump) compound impossible and is completely against the phonetic rules of the language. And many, very many in fact, Chinese speakers neither know pinyin nor speak English. The same is true for many other non-Chinese languages.
It gets a bit better, e.g., in Japanese that, other than the logographic script, has two syllabaries that make it possible to represent Trump as something probably more like Tu-ru-mpu.
> I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" […]
Since you also earlier called out «[…] (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language», spelling Cao as Tsao (which is what they do in Taiwan but not in the mainland) is not going help as nearly all English speakers will drop the «t» and pronounce it as «Sao». And, since «ts» is one sound and not two, «Sao» is also the English Te Lang Pu.
I’ve seen similar suggestions but one of the best things about English is that we don’t have that nonsense. It would just be a source of annoyance and consternation adding more noise to news and politics in the Anglosphere.
> Yeah but we in the Anglosphere have this wonderful phrase for people that get too hung up on it: “get over it.”
Unfortunately for the rest of the world outside of your beloved "anglosphere" using wrong spelling results in said "anglosphereian" being utterly butthurt.
Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?
It won’t work. Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States. And this is when the metric system is vastly more straightforward, simply better, and universally adopted. The English language? No way any standardization would work. And that unlike the Imperial system the variations in English is probably a feature, not a bug.
>Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States.
The US doesn't use Imperial units; it uses "US Customary" units. They're not the same, though there is some overlap. Imperial units are used in the UK, which is why they're called "imperial" (from "empire"--the British Empire). Imperial inches, for instance, are the same as US inches (2.54cm), but UK/Imperial gallons are quite different from US gallons, which is why the miles-per-gallon ratings for cars are so different between the two countries.
> guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography
gives a somewhat false impression regarding the influence and standing of this body. Orthography was traditionally what was written in the Duden dictionary/thesaurus. Only in 2004 or so there was a push for a moderate reform for German as taught in schools, and it was deemed necessary to have at least Austria and Switzerland join (hence the council isn't a natioval body), whereas neighbouring countries with German-speaking minorities such as Italy were not sitting at the table it seems.
One reason English is so popular (aside from pure economics) and that other countries quickly adopt English slang words is because we don't have such a thing.
From my observation adoption of english (and it's slang) is mostly due to "verbal colonialism" - pop culture mixed with "we work in english" spiced with "I'm cool so I'll drop this pointless slang from foreign language"...
But those standardisation bodies often get ignored by most of the speakers. Language is a living thing that evolves and changes in spite of the dictates of academies. Also, with global usage, any given body is not going to be able to do much, e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE says or a Quebecois would probably laugh at what the French language academy dictates.
> e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE says
Erm... curious that you brought that up as I lived in Chile for a couple of years and now in Spain. And while I agree that Chilean Spanish is wild it does follow RAE spelling guidelines, or at the very least I haven't seen any obvious deviations. Now there's a lot of modismos ("chilenismos", local words formed usually by borrowing from natives Mapuche in south or Quechua in the north) but they still tend to follow more-or-less spelling. Accent/pronounciation is yet another thing but that doesn't affect spelling all that much. And on top of that there is a lot of "mutilation" of words when using whatsapp (either being in a hurry or being from low social background) but even in even so slightly more formal setting people immediatelly fallback to official spelling.
(Spanish is more gracefull when it comes to spelling as "what you hear you write" and vice versa so maybe the problem is less pronounced)
France has the Académie Française. Well, no-one respects them. The first woman to enter it was Marguerite Yourcenar and she was strongly antifeminist; And they said to not use the Français.e.s spelling and rather keep the usual “Français(es)”, and suddenly all administrations started the dot-based version.
But which English? American and British English are substantially different. Spelling of many words, expressions, even the way quotation marks and periods are ordered.
I doubt either country will ever accept the other's version.
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...)