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0 pointsnewsbinator4y ago0 comments

That's true, it's going in that direction. But that's like saying there's less Malaria year over year because we're naturally building cities and towns that displace mosquito habitats.

If we're going to agree that X is a problem and that we're happy the problem is naturally diminishing at some snail-like pace, then let's also agree to take direct action to solve X properly and now.

We're tackling the Malaria problem, with dollars and behavior changes. Let's tackle the Tower of Babel problem with dollars and behavior changes. English is an okay global language, for example, but its writing system is far from okay.

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thatjoeoverthr4y ago

Empirically, most people deal with English’a dumb spelling. Over a billion people have gone and learned English, on top of native speakers. We’re using it now. Your hypothetical new language would have to displace this incumbent which for all practical purposes already does what you want of it. Miraculously, people can do more than one language so all this happens without anyone abandoning their languages. English spelling is not okay but it’s not -far- from okay. Most people (who, again, empirically deal with it fine) are typing with autocorrect.

newsbinatorOP4y ago

Every person who learns English writing today spends literal years learning it to the point of not being embarrassingly bad at writing it.

I'm not sure if you've ever had to learn English as a non-native English speaker, but it's one of the hardest, most painful, longest things to get truly proficient at, equal to other very hard aspects in one's very hard profession.

There are hundreds of millions of smart people who can't communicate their ideas to us in even simple English sentences. Whereas English grammar, as long as you avoid idioms, is pretty accessible as far as natural languages go.

So to sum up: as a global language English is maybe okay, but its writing system makes it not at all okay.

kaesar144y ago

I don't think anyone disagrees English writing sucks, but the inertia is massive, and the benefits not all that clear relative to the absolutely massive cost. Retraining every English speaker to write, changing all our keyboards, changing signage and physical written word... it's a near impossible task. And it's not clear to me what the benefit is when, yes, a billion people can more or less communicate in it just fine.

nitrogen4y ago

Regarding writing systems for English, have you seen this one? We had to learn about it when growing up in Utah:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet

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