Comment by noosphr
2 days ago
You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can understand how people speak you will understand how they write.
2 days ago
You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can understand how people speak you will understand how they write.
So you want a thousand different writing systems, or everyone just winging it as they go along?
That would make reading anything extremely slow and difficult.
Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.
Define "worked."
You're proposing to make reading just as difficult as understanding every other dialect of spoken English - something even most native speakers have difficulty with.
Your proposal would also eliminate whole-word recognition, which is what makes reading fast. It would slow us all down to the speed of young children just learning to sound out the letters.
3 replies →
And yet we manage it with speaking. This is why I call it brain damage. It's like trying to explain red to a blind woman.
We don't really manage it with speaking. I don't understand highland Scottish dialects at all. I have trouble understanding Cockney.
Yet people who speak those dialects can write anything down and I'll understand it perfectly with no effort.
You don't understand the value of standardization. It's what makes reading fast and independent of dialect. People who read English don't literally sound out the letters. They recognize the whole word instantly. Sounding out the letters is only a fallback mechanism.
What you're proposing might work for a tiny language with only one main dialect. English is a global language with a huge number of dialects. Major languages like this need standardized writing systems, and to no one's surprise, they all have them.
1 reply →