this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (15 children)

I’m OK with the grammar, but the spelling is a total train wreck.

I wish we could just ignore that bit of history and start from scratch, because carrying a thousand years of historical baggage has gotten completely ridiculous at this point. There are also so many borrowed words from so many different languages that you can’t spell anything correctly without knowing the language of origin.

Just look at spelling bees, for example. English-speaking people seem to be okay with that, but people from other countries are like, “WTF are you doing? Just listen and write. What’s wrong with you?” Thanks to history, the sound has pretty much nothing to do with the letters. Forget about the rules. Just memorise each word individually.

That’s not OK. Someone needs to fix that mess, and many people have tried already. It looks unfixable to me. Maybe we should just abandon English and switch to any other language.

I wonder if Icelandic would be nicer.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 9 points 4 days ago (12 children)

I feel like English needs a spelling reform, but that's never going to happen.

I like what Americans did with -ise/-ize, but they can take the 'u' from colour from my cold dead hands.

[–] bob_lemon@feddit.org 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The Problem with that is that English lacks uniformity. There is simply no possible spelling that works for Oxford, Houston, Vancouver, Perth, Lagos and Johannesburg at the same time. Heck, it doesn't even work between London, Manchester and Edinburgh.

So which pronunciation do you match the spelling to? What is "High English"?

[–] chramies@europe.pub 1 points 3 days ago

English could be mostly a written language for many people - they read it rather than hearing or speaking it. So changing the spelling, if that is true, would be just the wrong thing to do.

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