Let's take a look at your proposed reform... How should we treat vowels before consonant clusters? Let's at first assume they are short just like before double letters and therefore leave words like 'anger', 'limb', and 'cost' alone. But what about the long vowels in 'angel', 'climb', or 'host'? In order to maintain consistency, we have to spell all consonants before short vowels as double letters even when in clusters or at the end of a word. So we get 'annger', 'limmb', and 'cosst'. Hmmm. We'd also get absolute abominations like 'proppossittion', 'addammannt', and 'annimmossitty'. Or should I say 'abbomminnations'? And how are you supposed to maintain the intervocalic voicing of the 's' in 'proposition'? Regularising the use of single and double letters on its own doesn't solve the underlying issue of vowel length ambiguity in English orthography, all the while making writing a more arduous and space-inefficient task, as well as ironically making reading more difficult as well. Spelling reform proposal aside, your videos are excellent and you deserve more recognition.
I would tend to agree with you, and exclusively keep the reform to set words where there is already precedent. Like "metallic"/"intervocallic". Honestly I'm surprised more people haven't criticised it yet, it's not a very good idea tbh. But for what it's worth, it isn't supposed to be applied consistently across the orthography.
@@kklein I would personally opt for modifying the vowels themselves in order to clarify both vowel length and quality simultaneously. As ridiculous of a video it was, apandah's own take on spelling reform mentioned this idea which I can't disagree with. (I sincerely apologise if you aren't acquainted with apandah, lmfao)
Simple answer, diacritics. English needs them, honestly. There's a lot of ways in which they help english be more accessible. Name Explain made a great video on the issue: ruclips.net/video/Ap2A4A6RzAY/видео.html
Ääs a geerman who löörned arabic ei would propoos "eingel", "cliimb" äänd "hoost". Problem with the lääst uon iß "oo" meiks än "uu" sound... wuei not wreit it ääs uu. Aal of this is still eesilyy reedabl, ääs theer iß ounlyy uon leter moor. "Buut" would stil be red leik "boot" bei someuon wuu speeks eenglish.
As one of the 10 german speaking people in Belgium, I can tell you that we do use the new spelling. Whoever made the map/was the source for it, probably just forgot that we exist. Something you get used to after a while.
Find irgendwie krass, dass es deutschsprachige Belgier gibt, weil man wirklich nie was darüber hört… Macht ihr denn mehr in Deutschland oder im Rest der Wallonie?
@@bintisf Hängt davon ab, ich wohne nah an Aachen. Dann teilt sich das auf, je nachdem was praktischer ist. Die Eifler wohnen relativ ausm Schlag was große Städte angeht, die fahren auch noch viel nach Luxemburg. Film und Fernsehen ist aber fast exklusiv deutsch (außer bei Eltern, die ihren Kindern französisch beibringen wollen, oder den 3 Leuten die das Lokalprogramm vom BRF gucken)
@@bintisf Die Deutschsprachigen Belgier sind ein Überbleibsel vergangener Zeiten, früher war dort die Deutsche Grenze ein wenig weiter westlich, nach dem ersten Weltkrieg wurde diese Grenze leicht nach Osten verlegt und so gibt es nun Deutschsprachige Gemeinden in Belgien. Diese Region ist generell bekannt als Eupen-Malmedy oder Ostbelgien.
German here. The spelling reform happened when I was inbetween elementaroy and middle school. For me the new spelling rules where immediately understandable and way more predictable than the former spelling convention. That spelling reform was a very well thought out move.
I was in Grundschule back then. At Gymnasium however, it seemed to me that teachers/schools/society decided what is right and what's not just depending in how they liked it. I am 32 years now, graduated Uni, work in a job where E-Mails are an important part of every day and I am still a freestyler concerning commas, spelling and the use of the "ß". To be honest, the Rechtschreibreform is a big confusion until today, probably for all my life. 😅 Liebe Grüße aus Mosbach (Baden).
@@DeKrischa Warum bin ich nicht überrascht, dass das von einem Badner kommt. Da wurde das ja sogar zum Landesmotto erklärt. Zitat: "Wir können alles, außer Hochdeutsch".
It's not perfectly accurate for the old spelling rules, though. It used to be so that you would put ß for double S when they occurred at the end of a word *or word segment*, i.e., "bißchen" or "Haß" (but "hassen"). That has to do with its history as a combination of long S and "final S" (Schluss-S or as they would have put it back then, Schluß-S), since Eszett really evolved from two different ligatures (sz and ss). With this spelling, it was very clear where the syllable ended. It was biß-chen. Today we spell it "bisschen", because the i is short. However, this leads to a situation where you could read it as "bis-schen" with a long i, since sch represents the German "sh" sound. The new rules however are more consistent in most places.
@@castleclasher1236 Proper nouns (names) won't change. New streets and towns and whatever will use the new spelling and the odd one might be changed, but overall I suspect proper nouns won't change much. I myself live in a city which uses an old spelling. I doubt it will change any time soon.
I've been told my spelling grades jumped up a lot in third grade, simply because my most common spelling mistakes were no longer wrong. New spelling is more consistent with the rules.
In a sense, a child who only knows the basic rules of a language's orthography is likely still able to write their native language phonetically, just represented through their current 'simple' knowledge of such orthography. So, in a sense, if 'proper' spelling ends up matching what a child (who only knows the previous basic rules of your language's orthography) would gravitate to when they hear something and try to spell it, then it must be a good thing because that means your orthography's now simple and intuitive enough to be understood even within the small span of a child's knowledge of writing.
Isn't that a testament to which spelling is more intuitive? I mean, just think of how much more easy it is to do that "mistake" than to misspell "ellopping" or misspell "misppel". If you see these 2 latter ones you pretty much know that that person is typing on a keyboard with inconsistently bouncy keys, because that's the only explanation that makes sense (apart from them being more dyslexic than anyone else in the whole history of spelling or being both high and drunk on some very hallucinogenic substances).
@@Pystro You could say its more intuitive yes, but the creator made that difference to be more like the German reform so in the case of this original commenter being German, its more intuitive to him because he is used to alot of double letters in the German language. I would be interested how other languages would feel trying to learn English with these changes. On the other hand cases like stopping, hopping, cropping use the -ping suffix without omitting the extra p so maybe it is more intuitive as 'developping', its hard to say (though hoping is ofc already a word).
@@OhhLoz I may be equally biased because I'm German as well, but I would assume that "devellopping" would look far less wrong than "misppel" to native English speakers as well.
The German reform worked, in part, because it already had a regulated and reformed language to work on. The last German orthographic Reform had been less than 100 years earlier, culling most of the real harsh outliers that English still struggles with, but not even the vowel shift shit, which German just never spelled out like english anyway. Also, German reforms have a lot less trouble getting hold since they mainly concern Germany and than allow Austria and Switzerland - who already have their own slightly different rules - to adapt. In contrast, english Reforms need to be heard in England, the US, Canada, Australia and more.
True about needing to get different lands on board. But I can say that what’s spoken in Austria and southern Germany is quite dissimilar to what’s spoken in northern Germany. The spelling reflects northern German pronunciation. For example, in Bavaria they say “ee bee” but they still spell it “ich bin.” So I guess I’m saying it’s possible for English, even though the different countries have very different dialects.
@@leDespicable Standard-German is a mix of many dialects, that doesn't mean that dialects are wrong. Standard-German is a writing language, with no spelling-rule unlike many people think. Also there are no writing rules anymore, only recommendations.
@@anniehasting1133 It resembles middle-german, because it was contrived there. (Das Hochdeutsche wurde ja von sächsischen Kanzlisten erfunden.) Because of this, north-german dialects are also very dissimilar to the contrived unified spelling. You spell it "Pferd" not "Fead".
@@juandiegovalverde1982 and retracing its evolution usually does a better job of that than just trying to phonetically transcribe a dialect with no regard for context - sounds changes within a dialect tend to be fairly consistent, which is why it's possible to reconstruct extinct languages from their descendants.
The other successful spelling reform is Malay and Indonesian in 1972. We manage to change the mess of different spelling from the two standards, like the word "Chuchu" and "Tjutju" into "Cucu" (means grandchild). I agree with your criteria for spelling reform because in this spelling reform we can still read old spelling, and it's easier than previous spelling.
As a half German, half Indonesian I say you are absolutely right. Indonesian orthography is amazing, Indonesian learners (which are also “quite a few” Indonesians because Bahasa Indonesia is a lingua franca) can most of the time successfully guess how a word is spoken. It’s the anti-english!
I've heard the Indonesian language be praised for this before and I love it. We should start a linguistic revolution: Either we get a spelling reform, or we all make German and or Indonesian the new main international languages.
@@AL-qe4qc it rarely though, but malaysia and indonesia recieved people from each other country pretty often at the time. Malaysia spelling are mostly based on English because of British while Indo is dutch based.
The joke I always say about English is that the spelling is so bad we literally have contests called “spelling bees” to see who can master English. The irony is that no one realizes how hard it is.
Although IPA is called international,but I think it’s made for the English terrible spelling.😂Because the case of other language written in Latin is much better.Even some such as Spanish almost don’t use it for foreign students.😂
Conventional IPA for English is just as bad. English has mostly diphthongs with a few monophthongs, yet many of the diphthongs are transcribed as if they were monophthongs, confusing learners more. E.g. "coup" is pronounced [kʰʊu̯] rather than what the notation /kuː/ suggests, which is like the German "Kuh" [kʰuː] ("cow").
I'm apart of the Appalachian dialect, and I want ə to replace 'a. TH -> DH. Words like smooth, turn more into smoov. The -> Dhə would work rather well.
One thing to mention: Switzerland doesn‘t use the ß at all. We allways write „ss“ instead. So here people already wrote „dass“ before 1996. For most situations it goes absolutely fine. Only for „Massen“ and „Maßen“ and „Busse“ and „Buße“ it could lead to missunderstandings.
I literally saw a Swiss advertisement for alcohol where it said "In Massen genießen". That's supposed to mean "Enjoy in moderation", but it reads exactly the same as "Enjoy in abundance"
I remember when we read an old book(Wilhelm tell) in german class and one of the characters name was "geßler" but pronounced [gεslɐ] and everyone pronounced it [ge:slɐ]
@@juandiegovalverde1982 I mean his family name is "Klein" (german for "small" or "little") . It's like asking a user named "C da Silva" or "Pereira" if he is Portuguese. Sure could be a Cylonese or Brazilian guy or some other nation...but a Portuguese family connection is obviously there. While people with Spanish usernames are all Mexican, obviously. An American guy convinced me.
just by making a quick search for german diaspora, one can see that just because someone has a German surname doesn't mean they're German. there are plenty of Schneiders, Kleins, Schmidts, Kuhn, Konder, etc, etc throughout the Americas. Speciallly in South Brazil and Argentina.
Another problem with English spelling reforms is that the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, etc. would all have to agree to change. Otherwise it would get even more confusing, especially considering spelling between these countries already have some widely debated differences. Edit: changed exorcisms to especially
@@VorteX-ox2fm Well ironically Americans have made the best attempt at English language reform to date by dropping the silent u in certain words like colour, labour, etc.
This is IMO the biggest problem with english spelling reforms, the whole point of the written language is that it doesn't care about dialect or accent, just as how chinese writing works (worked? idk) as a bridge between entirely separate languages. Which raises an interesting question: How feasible would it be to create a modern pan-indo-european written language that could work with several different spoken langauges? Or a bit easier, how about a pan-germanic written language? Pan-scandinavian?
One note: While the 1996 reform (and the 1901 one before that) were major reforms, German spelings are constantly changing on a small scale. Every few years or so, words that have gone through significant changes over the years are being overhauled to add new optional spellings. Not much fuss is ever made about that because it usualy hits words that are infrequent so keeping an unusual spelling alive would be pointless. Oh, one thing English can adapt directly from the German spelling reform: Just get rid of the "ph" and replace it with "f". There is no reason for the ph to exist. It is a spelling convention derived from a language that doesn't even use the Latin alphabet and denotes a differentiation that doesn't exist in English (bilabial v labiodental fricative).
I have to disagree on the "not much fuss about it" part, there are definitely complains or people mocking about things like "Kommas", "Kaktusse","Taxis" or "Pizzas" in the Duden.
@@MrDavibu Yeah, but that is grammar, not orthography. Grammar is a much more sensitive matter. What I am talking about is stuff like the option to leave out the silent e in "gerade"/"grade".
but the replacing ph with f in german thing is also inconsistent _Photographie_ turned into _Fotografie_ , but _Philosophie_ or _Physik_ didn't turn into _Filosofie_ and _Füsik_
@@DukeDukeGo But those are actually pronounced differently (I'm pretty sure), where the ph makes a softer sound than the f, like Philosophie vs Film. But for some newly introduced words like Photovoltaik (fancy word for solar panels), that line got blurred again. But whoever came up with that word anyway, why was a Solaranlage not good enough.
Bro this video was so good and high quality that i thought it must be semi-viral with hundreds of thousands of views, and i was quite surprised by the number of views you got! This video is amazing, straight to the point, and I 100% agree with the point you made. Props to you!
@@JeegsVideoDump Well the algorithm just suggested this channel to me today and I binge watched all the videos. I assume I'm not the only one the video was suggested to.
As a german I automaticly write many english words with double letters in places where there aren´t any supPosed to be. I think the reason is because I started learning english in 3rd school grade, so subconsciously rules of german spelling intermixed with english ones (I had english for 9 years in school and german for 12). Also like mentioned in the last bit of the video for me it makes more sensce.
Happened to me as well. By the way, it might help if you try to practice english sentence structure. I noticed you put that "any" in the wrong place. The thing is, English has no genitiv, akkusativ and dativ cases, so it relies on the position of the word in a sentence to provide extra meaning. Also, you should not leave out all the double letters (automatically, supposed). Good luck!
Spanish must look incredibly weird to you since many cognates drop repeated consecutive letters. Spanish spelling and grammar is easier than English, but I always appreciate how English does not gender *every* inanimate object.
Could just be your German accent in English. Judging by your grammar (which good on a technical level, but has flaws in syntax a native speaker wouldn't commit) I deduce there to be a good chance you're having an audible accent too. In English the best approach (imo) is to memorize words by image, not by system; think Kanjis in Japanese.
suppose we invent another letter just to distinguish long from short vowels ... ß-fetishism to the max. and just inventing seven new letters for the long vowels would be less work and less harmful
The thing about proposed English spelling reforms is, there always will be a counterargument to any proposal ever made and the reason for that is simple: no one seems to agree what they are actually trying to achieve. You'd have to decide whether to prioriatize morphology/ethymology or phonology and just stick with it. If you choose phonology, you'd just have to deal with irregularities like "solem" but "solemnity" (just like Polish deals with irregularities like "stół" (table) but "stołu" (of the table) and Turkish writes "kebap" (nominative singular) but "kebaba" (dative singular)). Then you could start looking at how words are actually pronounced versus how they are written. Yes, you can get rid of the letter X if you want - who cares that "taks" would look like a plural of the hypothetical word "tak". So do verbs like "tells" or "falls" but people who speak English, well, speak English and know that they aren't. And they would know that there is no such word as "tak", especially when context is given. Although as a non-native English speaker, I can vouch that the letter X is the least of our concerns when learning English. And if you wish to reform the spelling of vowels or consonants like "wh", you would have to choose one dialect to base the orthography on, there's no going around that. Or create a different orthography for every dialect, sure. And if you choose to prioritize morphology and ethymology... well, that's basically what English spelling is now. These are not easy decisions but they would have to be made to even start thinking about any successful spelling reform. And you would have to have considerable courage to make them, the kind of courage that no one in the English speaking world seems to have. Personally, I think a good place to start would be loanwords. Words like "beauty" or "group" aren't spelled weirdly just because English spelling is weird, they're weird because they kept the original spelling of the language(s) (in this case French) the were borrowed from, and in those languages those spellings are perfectly reasonable. But for some reason, English decided to keep them as they were and that's only one of the many reasons for the oddities of English spelling. But if, like you said, we should focus on individual words, why not start with them?
i completely disagree - e.g. lead ... if its a metal, its pronounced led, if its a hint lead. there is absolutely no way for anyone to know how to say the word without context - and im pretty sure neither one is a loanword (both are of germanic origin). so if you read a sentence starting with lead.. you have to check the context first, before you can make a decision on how to pronounce it. how is that a thing? there are words, which are pronounce the same, but written differently: see, sea. which one is the loanword? another example: car, care, cat, can. why is the "a" in car not spelled differently? ...and dont get me started with can, can´t and cannot... its the same word pronounced differently without any indication! in german it would be cän, can´t cännot - that way everyone instantly knows how to say it. why is it so difficult to just write it as it is spoken? pronounciations is completely random in english. the worst part of learning english.
@@tchop6839 The combination "au" and "eau" are consistently pronounced /o/ so it "makes sense." What doesn't make sense is English keeping the spelling but saying it as /ju/
Great comment. You've hit the nail on the head. There is far too much rift between the two dominant standard dialects of English (RP and General American) not to mention all the dialects across the Anglophone world. Phonology-based reform is out of question, imo, in our current geopolitical and cultural reality.
1:03 fun fact: The in phlegmatic was originally silent as well (the word was written fleumatik or flematik among other variants in Middle English, all without ). It was only after the spelling was changed to it's modern form, that the pronunciation changed to reflect this new spelling.
I remember how everyone was angry about the reform back then and there are still people who claim that they will never get used to it...but I guess by now, most people have gotten used to it, also due to autocorrect. Even if you have learned the "old system" like I did, when you are writing and word is constantly correcting your mistakes, eventually you get used to the new one.
"and word is constantly correcting your mistakes" They are not mistakes - that is how language actually evolves - not by some bureaucrats dictating how to write.
@@ABaumstumpf what are you on about? spelling reforms (outside of France lol) are mostly done in order to incorporate natural changes of language into the "official rules" so the mistakes they were talking about weren't mistakes because the system was too slow to catch up to the natural evolution of language, they were mistakes of someone who themselves hadn't caught up to the changes which did already happen naturally and were subsequently codified in the official rules
Had the same experience living in the united states after learning British english, eventually i just got tired fighting with autocorrect and got used to the American spelling
@@Mmmm1ch43l The 2 german changes that were the focus of this video were the opposite of your claim - they made the way people actually wrote the "wrong" way.
2:51 I've been learning German for a couple years now, and I never realised this rule, of any of these rules for that matter, I just sort of picked it up intuitively.. very interesting, and well made video!
I think it would also be worth addressing separately more drastic spelling reforms where, for example, the entire script changes (Turkey, post-Soviet Azerbaijan), and how people deal with those
𐑨𐑯𐑛 𐑞𐑨𐑑 𐑥𐑱 𐑚𐑰 𐑞𐑩 𐑒𐑱𐑕 𐑓𐑹 𐑱𐑙𐑜𐑤𐑦𐑖 𐑦𐑓 𐑞𐑩 𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯 𐑨𐑤𐑓𐑩𐑚𐑧𐑑 𐑒𐑨𐑗𐑧𐑟 𐑪𐑯 (translation for people who don't read the shavian alphabet in the Read More) and that may be the case for english if the shavian alphabet catches on
Because culturally East Belgium is dependent on Germany. Diverging from German spelling while 99% of the books you read in schools are from Germany would make no sense.
I started school in 2007 directly learning the new spellings and I never realized how recent these changes were But I do remember adults often saying stuff like "the new spelling" or "ah they changed the spelling", which always confused me Also because I switched between the German and the Swiss school sytems 4 times, I had to learn the Scharfe s 'ß' twice because we don't use it in Switzerland 5:48 I misspell a lot of English words because of this like 'address' or 'development' Another problem: English doesn't seem to have an Equivalent to 'Hochdeutsch'
Now that you say it. Yes, especally my teacher in first class. She was like 50 years old back then and talked a lot about the changes but i didn't know what she meant and didn't think much of it until now.
"English doesn't seem to have an Equivalent to 'Hochdeutsch'" "(Hannoveraner) Hochdeutsch" is usually said to mean the standard dialect of German (standard high german), but Hochdeutsch is also used to mean High German generally which almost all German dialects are. This is in contrast to Low German aka Plattdüütsch or Platt which is pretty much it's own language (active speakers mostly in the north). Standard High German also varies a bit between Austria Switzerland and Germany, but importantly it's standardised inside each state. English also has this, some English speaking countries do have a standard dialect, General American, Oxford English... actually not sure whether there is an agreed upon version of Kenyan or Indian English, but they are definitely more cohesive within themselves than they are to Oxford English.
I started school in 1999 and somehow managed to go through a couple of iterations of the reform before they finally somewhat settled on something. I can still remember our teacher coming to us and telling us that now we have to spell this that way and suddenly a word like Schifffahrt with three F existed and of course no daß ever. Pretty sure that was already the case when I entered school but of course you don't really use that word in first grade.
@@Jakokokoroko yeah, my stupid ass really thought it was two s, despite the name literally being "sz". Oh, well I guess they wouldn't be calling it ss even if "ß" was two s...
@@K2ELP Same, like how can you not know that as a native German speaker? lol I had to argue with my father all the time why "küssen" instead of "küßen" makes more sense (or "dass" instead of "daß"). I mean just look at the words "Fluss" and "Fuß" - they're spelled almost exactly the same but pronounced completely different (and obviously mean very different things), so why would I then spell Nussschale like "Nußschale"?
The most successful English spelling reform was Noah Webster's, in 1828. Not all of his recommendations were adopted, but many of them were -- at least in the USA; the rest of the English-speaking world is still slowly catching up after almost 200 years. And other simplified spellings have become unofficially accepted, even if they are still not considered to be proper English, like "thru" and "nite". "Donut" used to be in that category too, but due to the success of Dunkin' Donuts, most people now use the simplified spelling rather than "doughnut".
I like that, it's so much more intuitiv and easy. As a german I know of our spelling reforms but I never seen them make so much sense to me as I got from your video
I love that sometimes in German, you can tell the age of a person by how they spell. When I get a note from someone who writes "daß" instead of "dass", "Du" instead of "du", I can immediately tell that this note was written by an older person.
@@Krenni98 Um... are you German? No, older people use "Du" similarly to "Sie" when writing to someone, capitalizing it out of respect, in the middle of a sentence. To younger generations it looks outdated.
@@Gaish I'm 20 and I use upper case "Du" for people at work because we have a company wide convention for addressing everyone informally, but it still feels awkward being that casual with someone older and more authoritative than me, so I try to do this at least.
AFAIK changing capitalisation of adresses in letters was never removed. It's just not taught anymore (and spell check can't check for it). Doesn't change that only older people do it, but makes people who don't do it wrong. But in the end there is no right or wrong German. People just forget that a private company doesn't have the power to declare it one or the other, and it's just the case that companies and government use the standart set by that private company.
Fun coincidence: when the proposed spelling reform for English “the” came up, it reminded me of how in Late Old Swedish and Early Modern Swedish the word “þe” (“they” and plural “the”; in modern language it’s “de”) was often spelled as “the” or “dhe”.
Removing the thorn letter is also the reason why people ended up writing "ye olde", because over time handwritten þ turned into something similar to y And it's still pronounced the same way as modern english. "the old" and "þe olde" is pronounced the same.
I started going to school in 2009 and remember how all the books in german class also showed the old way of spelling a certain word. I thought back then that it is a regular thing to change the languange (about every 10 years) and that it is just used to fuck with people lol
This is the best take on English spelling reform I've ever seen. I absolutely hate the way some people complain about English spelling, especially non-English speakers who think our vowel system is whack because it's not like the continental one. Our vowel system has diverged from much of the rest of Europe, but it is perfectly systematic an learnable. It's not all memorization. I teach Japanese people English, kids to adults. Many of them super struggle with reading and spelling, often because they aren't taught phonics so they don't understand the way you break up the visual information it understandable phonetic parts. I then strive to teach them the phonics, the rules, the "fushigi na E" (magic E), or doubling consonants before ~ed or ~ing for short vowels. I teach things like "c & k get lonely easily, so at the end of short words with no other consonant, so they usually like to be together: ck" And this works. Some students of mine who do understand the phonics of reading can, just as native speakers, guess the reading of words they've never seen before with minimum mistakes. Our language is quite systematic after all, just a somewhat complex system. I think what makes it so frustrating is the long Latinate words. I often say how, unlike German, we keep more of the etymology within words. Angelo-Saxon and old French derived words fall under one fairly consistent system, while words from more modern French, from Latin or Greek roots, indeed from Italian or Spanish or German, get to keep their own orthographic style. Thus we get CHrist, CHeese, CHef, gnocCHi － these sorts of differences in how words are spelled & read. I explain these things to my students. I explain the ways words have spellings that made sense before, but the pronunciation then changed. in "light," or "though," was once pronounced, I tell them, saying that middle English pronunciation out loud for them much to their amusement. This demystifies the spelling a lot, and when you allow yourself to learn these interesting histories embedded into the words, you learn to appreciate their strangeness a lot more. And the fact that English can be unpredictable can often be a really manageable problem. I often teach my students about the three "ers." You got and and these are all the same (at least in my dialect of American English, and I think so in standard British too, even if you drop the /r/), so you have to memorize which one, but if you have to guess is the most common. That's annoying, but manageable, and you can distinguish homophones this way too: fir vs fur. I teach Japanese people, remember, and their writing system is WAY MORE intense about this kind of thing. Because they use kanji (Chinese characters), they often have homophones written with different characters: 橋 端 箸 are all read as "hashi" (though their is pitch accent involved too that differentiate them somewhat), even sligtly different nuances of what's basically the same word can be written differently: 止める、留める、停める are all "stop" but with different nuances; the middle one for "stop/stay at a hotel etc," the last one only for vehicles. This kind of complexity is not that weird, and even has a lot of usefulness and artistic potential in it. But you're right that there are spelling features of English that could be improved, especially in those Latinate vocabulary. I've got a masters degree in teaching English, and I still can't figure out if it's single or double consonants sometimes. I also don't like how "soccer" is not "socker," but that one is less of a nuisance. So that's where I want to praise what you have to say about spelling reform. You're so damn right that the best reforms are the ones that make the rules we already know and understand more consistent. English HAS had spelling reforms, just more so on my side of the pond. Every American knows about Webster and his reforms. Actually, he wasn't really "reforming" English, as it had no authoritative rules back then, only loose conventions. He chose the spelling variants he thought were simpler, the ones that followed the basic patterns more closely. Meanwhile in Britain, different conventions were becoming standardized. Webster thought the in "colour" was not necessary, while the British like the version with it, stuff like this. Other simplification he proposed didn't catch on: soop for soup, or aker for acre, but the point is they all followed the already established rules and styles that every literate person knew. And there are plenty of words that have changed or are changing just naturally, the key feature of such vernacular spelling reforms being, that they make things more consistent with our internalized rules. Risk was once "risque." In the US at least, we very often write "donut" instead of "doughnut." We've got "lite" beer instead of "light." My grandmother lives in the town of Middleborough, MA but the post accepts people writing letters addressed to "Middleboro." In super causal contexts we have "tho" for "though," and "thru" for "through." These too, could be normal spelling at some future point. English has a lot less centralized authority over spelling reforms than some other countries, so I don't see major spelling reform movements gaining traction anytime soon, but if they do, they'll be things that are putting stamps of approval on already widely used and understood vernacular spellings like "tho" and "thru," much like Webster did. I for one, think we gotta get rid of "all right." It's "alright" people! It's linguistically one word!! You can tell by the intonation pattern!
Good comment but I disagree about "all right". Like, at the beginning of a sentence, it has stress on "all", but you can also stress "right" if you want to, like so: "Did you like it? It was all *right*, but it could've been better". So stress can fall on either morpheme, making it not really act like a single word
@@mmmmmmmmmmmmm There's a difference between "may be" and "maybe." There are times when you use "may be." (you may be right"), and times you use "maybe" (you're maybe right"). "May be" is two words, and "maybe" came from those two words, but it is one word now in how it is used. If you are not using "maybe," but rather the original "may be," then you can write it as such. The same goes for "alright." The kind of "alright" I am talking about is ONE WORD. You can tell, because it is stressed as one word. If you aren't stressing and intoning it as one word, "alright," but rather saying "all right" then you are saying the original two words and can write it as such. I never say "all right" though, I say "alright" only and I will write it that way consequently. It's the difference between "a white house" and "the White House." In the former, he have stress on white & on house, and a constant, punchy intonation (at the end of affirmative sentence). in the latter, "White House" is like one word, only "white" is stressed, the intonation is falling as a single flowing melody. "Alright" does the same, the first syllable is not stressed, and thus the vowel is reduced. It is clearly said as a single word-like unit, not two distinct lexemes, and the spelling of "alright" feels more natural as a result. And you're example of of "it was all right, but..." sounds misguided to me. First of all "right" is ALWAYS stressed, it's the stressed syllable of "alright." The question is weather "all" is also stressed, which for me is never the case. Second, you seem to be mixing up stress and intonation. I just said "alright" has a falling intonation. This is for the end of a affirmative sentence. If you are asking a question, showing hesitancy in your answer, or showing that you're sentences is not yet finished, you may raise the intonation at the end. This does not change the fact that "alright" is stressed and intoned as a single lexical phrase.
@@rdreher7380 No, I'm talking about sentence-level stress to put extra emphasis on the word, which shows it's a different word. I'm not really sure which kind of "alright" you're talking about then. I don't think I have any kind that's stressed as one word.
@@mmmmmmmmmmmmm "sentence level stress" is, as far as I have ever read, not a thing. Emphasis is not the same thing as stress. Stress is rhythm, it's where the beats are in words and phrases. "All right" takes two full beats, two whole notes if you talk in music, or two feet if you talk in poetry. "Alright" is a syncopated eighth note pair, an iamb. Emphasis is completely separate layer of rhetorical nuance. Intonation and timing can emphasize. Emphasis can override stress rules, good rhythmic use of stress can help emphasize, but emphasis is not the same as stress. I am going. Normally: buh-ba BA-buh. I AM going. buh BUH BA-buh. Emphasizing "am" in such a sentence overrides the normal rule that "am" is an unstressed lexeme. But this doesn't change the nature of the word "am" and it's stress. This rhetorical device is breaking the stress rules, not defining them. Alight, alright, alright, alright alright? Alright, alright, alright, alright alright. There, I just created an iambic pentameter. This meter cannot work if you treat "all right" as two separate words with full stressed beats. What dialect of English to you speak? If you say "all right" with two beats, and no melody of intonation, then you can represent your weird dialect that way. I speak American English, upstate NY style, and for me this is one word and ought to be spelled such. I've never heard anyone say "all right." I know brits say "week end" instead of "weekend," but I'm pretty sure the say "a'right" very one-word like too.
@@mmmmmmmmmmmmm I tried saying "alright" with stress on the first syllable, and did realize it sounds rather British. "Ol' roight, let's get along then." I am imaging a caricature of a copper, like you might see in Monty Python, and when I say it like that it does start to sound like two beats. Maybe you speak some kind of British like that. I have a hunch though that that kind of "Ol roight," as an interjection would be different from the adjective "alright," as in "Oi, a' you o'roight?"
I started school the very year the spelling reform was implemented, so I've always learned the new way. I can imagine that it would have been a bit confusing if I'd started school like 2 years earlier and suddenly had to relearn stuff I'd _just_ learned I remember adults going "argh, new spelling!" sometimes when I was a kid, but by now I haven't heard that in years. I read old library books with the old spelling without any problem. Heck I read writing by Martin Luther with only mild problems The far bigger problem with reading old german texts is the Fraktur-typeface and Sütterlin-handwriting.
obwohl oft zwischen einem offenen e und einem ä sehr wenig unterschied besteht und in der Rechschreibung werden beide buchstaben oft vertauscht. Außerdem ist die st und sp regel durch viele ausnahmen kaum zu erkennen und wörter wie deshalb und weshalb sollten mit zwei s geschrieben werden. Es gibt halt trotzdem einfach sehr viele Ausnahmen aber natürlich nicht so wie im englischen
@@jamjambo351 Unfortunately, many learners tend to really pronounce every letter, which makes them sound like Hitler when rolling Rs in words which in reality form an a-Schwa instead.
While it is still a controverse topic among scientists I tend to believe that language influences your thinking. German is very precise in comparison to English and French, especially the grammar. And so maybe this influences things like "German precision" or beaucracy which is renowned for almost 150 years by now.
@@leDespicable well rolling Rs don't exist in german, the R is more like in french. but pronouncing the Rs while uncommon is still perfectly correct. In general its just like once u know all the rules u can literally read any word even if u have never heard it (except for some foreign words)
We might be able to use and in the contexts of meaning /s/ and /z/, at least when we already use a or a in that spot. So while face->fase is perhaps a bit drastic as a change, advise->advize is perhaps workable. Though of course it would also depend a lot on whether most dialects use the groups consistently. American spelling has already done some of it already, so spreading those spellings where it doesn’t cause confusion is perhaps one option, though words like centring vs centering show that American spelling reform obviously can’t be just blindly applied across the board. It seems reasonable to say that English really needs a bunch of spelling reforms, rather than one comprehensive spelling reform. Any spelling reform that could reasonably be implemented, will necessarily be limited and be unable to deal with most of the inconsistencies. Some if that spelling reform should also just be to teach the rules that currently exist that are widely unknown and thus only subconsciously self-taught. We do have greek, latin, and french loan words, all of which have more or less their own spelling system, none of which we teach, but make up nearly ¾ of all our words. If we could standardize on perhaps 3 spelling systems (Germanic, Latinate, and Grecian), tidy up each of those systems, push words into one of those 3 systems unless they were being spelled similar to their loanword origin to show themselves as a nonnative word (so treating jalapeño as a Spanish foreign word rather than spelling it halapeno or whatever the Latinate rules would spell that word as to treat it like a Spanish loanword). And to reiterate, it would probably have to be a multigenerational thing, and sold to be a multigenerational thing. One generation would make minor reforms to standardize one small part of English spelling. 30 years later, a different group of people would look at the system they have now grown up with and find the simple reforms that can be implemented. For example, perhaps if we used s and z to indicate /s/ and /z/ consistently, then spelling face as fase would be easily understood to be pronounced the same. Then another 30 years later the next group of English speakers could decide whether tack could be spelled as tac, tacked as tacced and take as tace as the c would be easily understood as being the same of k when c hasn’t been used to make an s or z sound for over 30 years. Maybe that’s still too short of a time period so they instead go with tack as tak and tacked as takked, take staying the same while case becomes kase, leaving ch the sole use for the letter c. In the latter ch can become c in another 30 years, the letter exclusively referring to that phoneme. In the former, c and ch are each their own phonemes and stay that way. Or maybe there’s good reasons to not do any of those reforms (probably the case), but the point remains that each reform successfully implemented should in theory make further reforms easier and while reading spelling from a hundred years ago may become difficult, there would never be a point where everyone couldn’t read because the spelling was unrecognizable. Perhaps for some of the older individuals who would have gone through 2 or 3 reforms in their lifetime this rate of change would be too much, but given how digital our life is currently, tools could be made to automatically translate spelling from one to the other, for those people who were unable to keep up with the series of reforms.
I think the time between reforms should be longer so that most people would go thru only 1 reform. A change every 30 years is too fast paced unless the reforms only touch a handful of words. Anywhere between 60 and 100 years would be better. I like your idea of grouping words by origin, you could use that to explain the letter *i* in machine and police (it would be easier if it was spelled mashin, tho), but if you adopt the Spanish/French rule for C (soft before E, I, Y) you shouldn't make other groups go in the exact opposite direction. Just add a K when hard C is necessary (socker, syncking) or an E when it's soft (i.e. don't drop the E from noticeable) and be done with it. It's OK if a 300-year manuscript is hard to read, but you should be able to read something from the previous century easily. If C changes its value every 30 years you wouldn't be able to read anything your mom writes to you (because she would probably mix old and new spellings all the time),
@@marcusaureliusf Also make sure the setup for each reform would be at least 20 years, to make sure by the time it starts being applied all possible changes are accepted. We don't want to repeat the german spelling reform that for 2 decades kept changing things, leaving an entire generation that sits halfway between because some things they learned are already obsolete when they finish school.
You make it sound easy. Back in the day, almost everyone in Germany was up in arms about the spelling reform. People complained about how the state trying to tell them how to use language was a blatant violation of their privacy (sound familiar?). One major newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, even openly refused to use the new spelling once it had become mandatory for official and school use. People used the rarest examples of words to criticize the changes, like "Delphin" to "Delfin" or downright fabricated fake examples like "Füsik" instead of "Physik". Nobody, however, talked about the "daß/dass", which is easily the most frequently used single word affected by the reform. And as a language teacher in Germany, I can reliably testify that no student ever gets the spelling of "dass" wrong (as long as they _mean_ the conjunction and do not confuse it with the article that just spells "das") - well, duh; because it follows a clear _rule._ And still nobody talks about how the reform made learning spelling _easier._ It seems that everybody who whined about it loudly back in the day does not want to draw attention to their failure in judgement, really... Which makes it so much poorer that Switzerland outright refused to join the reform and still writes words with a _long_ vowel followed by a sharp /s/ with "ss", not with "ß". Needless to say, the Franfurter Allgemeine has long since quietly adopted the reformed spelling. I suppose they, too, do not want to be reminded of how they initially swore to drop dead before they used this immature newfangled fashion.
German teachers have long given up on actually teaching (or discipline) and now are full time indoctrinators for progressivism. This post is par for the course and if you have a kid in german school like, I do you, expect that they'll receive one such one sided pro government sermon per day, of course always littered with derision for the other side. However, we are not your class so let me emphatically say that the state doesn't own the language no matter what a government teat sucking left/green teacher says. The only noteworthy consequence is of the reform was that nobody cares about spelling anymore except the people who learned and still write the old system. Even newspapers are littered with errors nowadays.
On the topic of spelling reforms, I highly encourage you to make a video about the disaster that has been the Portuguese spelling reform of 1990: meant to bring all Portuguese-speaking nations together under a unified spelling, it has been ratified at an extremely slow pace, there was a tremendous backlash in Portugal upon its implementation and it managed to anger native speakers from all Portuguese speaking countries (not just Portugal) due to the introduction of new and inconsistent rules that violate the 1st, 3rd and 4th principles you've highlighted at the end of your video. Apart from that, I'd just like to point you I've stumbled upon your channel very recently and I believe you're massively underrated. Keep up the good work, you've gained a new subscriber.
If you ask me, an easy way to solve english's bad spelling at least in part is to add diacritics to specify vowel lengths where they aren't consistent with what you would expect.
@@victorstroganov8135 It'd make learning english one hell of a lot easier tho. Sure, it's extra letters, but at least you fucking know how the shit is pronounced when you read it lol
Accent and breathing marks were, by far, the worst part of learning Ancient Greek; I see no reason why any sane person would introduce extraneous markings into a language that was blessed not to have them in the first place.
0:36 As someone who's suggested getting rid of the letter "c", my solution to the "ch" problem is to introduce a new letter to represent it since the "ch" sound is a distinct phoneme rather than just a "c" and "h" sound put together. The Cyrilic alphabet uses "Ч" for this sound which I quite like since it leaves less room for ambiguity.
@@kklein Like I said, reduced ambiguity. C doesn't represent any unique sound and "ch" is extremely inconsistent in English. It's sounds like "ch" in words like "catch" but can also sound like "k" or "sh" like in "ache" and "cache" respectively. "C" isn't exactly useful and I think a dedicated symbol to represent the "ch" sound would make more sense.
@@connorwright7040 If you really want to do that, then just use "c" as the symbol for /tʃ/. This is still a bad idea though, because you'll have to redo A LOT of stuff in the orthography. Intervocalic voicing is a big problem - if you replaced the "c" in replace with an "s" you'd get "replase", which reads /ɹɪˈpleɪz/, with a voiced fricative at the end (like in words like "phase" and "raise"). If you want to get rid of "c" in this capacity and only use it for /tʃ/ going forward, you'd need to make the z/s distinction consistent, which means your reform just got bigger, and you have to start redoing a lot more things than just this one letter... English orthography is a very bad system, but it's also a very interwoven system, with everything affecting everything else. I'm not saying you couldn't make a better writing system for English - you absolutely could! And many people have, and I admire their work. But just getting rid of "c" and calling it a day doesn't work... there's always more words to consider. Also those problems with the "ch" digraph you just mentioned... couldn't you solve them with A LOT less effort by just... changing those individual words? It's far less effort than getting rid of an entire letter from the alphabet, right? ache --> ake cache --> casche/cash [if you don't care about preserving written distinctions between homophones]/cashe
@@kklein I guess that really would basically require a complete overhaul of English orthography. Making reformed spelling unrecognizable to people used to the old spelling would be counterproductive. Point taken.
@@connorwright7040 Yes, that's why it's always more pratical to gradually incorporate variants, improve --> improov(e), sister --> syster (analogy with , ,, & ...), in the end of words usually is \i\ (EE) like , , , and , so may look y\ði\, the strong pronounciation of , so instead why not use , so perhaps it would be practical instead of , , and instead of , and
Reforming english spelling probably wouldn't really work. English is just too decentralised and spread. While German is only used in comparativley few countries as an official language, not even all of them have adapted the spelling reform and there are still differences even in those that did. English meanwhile is an official language in 67 countries, many of which already have different ways of spelling, most prominently British and American English. So I reckon even if a spelling reform were to take place, it probably wouldn't be adopted by a majority of English speaking countries.
I think an agreement between the USA, UK and Canada would have massive ripple effects as all Western media in native English would quickly adjust and the EU as an incredibly influential block of non-native English learners would follow suit as communication with Anglophones is among the foremost reasons for teaching English. At that point the new spelling would dominate the internet, all dictionaries would reflect it and everyone saying otherwise would be the odd one out. I don't think Australia would try to go it alone. India may be a more difficult sell, but it does not ultimately hold much sway over English in terms of global convention.
@@MrHodoAstartes Personally I do not think that the US, Canada and the UK could actually come to an understanding, as especially Canada builds the core of its identity on being different to America and would therefore not accept something like a universal spelling reform. If the suggesttion came from the UK, there is no way the US would follow and if the US were to suggest ist, I doubt the UK would agree, the pride on either side is just too great. Though I guess that the US would have the best chances given its influence on global and anglophone academia. One of the other problems would be centralising written English in Africa which, given its already very fractured and tribal nature, has very loose regulating on language. There are many ways to spell the same African languages and some that are almost impossible to spell with most writing systems. English is therefore pretty much impossible to standardise in Africa. Even if such a spelling reform were to take place. And as I had already mentioned, the German reform wasn't actually as effective as he made it out to be. Switzerland for example still has a lot of irregularities in its written language, so just imagine how that would work on a much larger scale with considerable backlash of the more conservative parts of academia. Even in Germany there are still discussions in wether or not the reforms actually made sense.
...Germany is an official language in Germany, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Austria, Namibia, parts of Italy, Denmark, Belgium and France. It is also a very common language for Eastern and Southern Europeans to speak. Hence "few countries" is extremely relative. In addition, there already is a distinction between American and British English, there is no need to worry about it now if there are already so many differences between those two (if anything, one could use a reform to streamline those a little bit).
The Brit’s and the Americans can standardize their English all they want, but Indians will still come along and make everyone speak their own brand of English.
In my 33 years as a German, I have never thought about the influence of a "ß" on vowels in my pronunciation. So I have unconsciously always applied the rule correctly, but never consciously noticed it. Exciting how language works and is learned. Thank you for opening my eyes for this little detail. :-)
My native language of Japanese had a large spelling reform relatively recently. Wi and we were removed as well as removing some incoherent syllables. I have some family in the mountains in Hokkaido and the dialect from pre-1945 and the difference is obvious. Especially when ‘私’ watashi (I) was made and they removed ‘わた歌詞’ watakashi (I)
Interesting. Personally, I've always had a rather negative opinion on the German spelling reforms. I went to school during the first one, so I had to re-learn some things that were the norm during my first years learning to write and read. And after I graduated, some of the "new" rules were revoked. The result is a generation, that writes as it pleases. I will admit that there were some useful changes though.
One of the *scarce* useful changes was _Alptraum → Albtraum,_ it’s caused by a spook, not by mountains. That’s pretty much it. _Quentchen_ *doesn’t* derive from _Quantum_ but from _Quent,_ and _Tolpatsch_ from Hungarian _Talpas,_ *not* from _tollen_ und _patschen_ The reform -perverted- topsy-turvied the first and most important rule of orthography: *Writing must serve the reader, not the writer.*
You have a generation of people living today that do much more radical things as they please. We have 69 genders. Men can be women and participate as women in sports There is no genders whatsoever and everyone is the same which throws the first two things out the window.... We should be glad that our Rechtschreibreform was just a minor obstacle for us. I remember I once had an admission exam for a school and I had to chose "new" or "old spelling". I didnt know there was a new NEW spelling reform. So I chose "NEW" and well I almost failed because I actually used the OLD one. So that was strange haha. Instead of calling it "spelling reform 19xx" with the year. They chose nonsense like "new" and "old".
Funnily enough, writing as one pleased was the norm until fairly recently for pretty much all languages. Yes, there were guidelines and conventions, but not hard rules like we have today, that's a thing of the past 200 years mostly.
@@ShiftySqvirrel Because of 200 years of decreasing illiteracy and the increasing number of potential recipients? Still, anyone can write as he pleases as long he doesn’t want to be read and/or understood. Once more: Writing is for the reader. Nobody cares about the orthography nor the scrawl of your shopping list - unless you hand it to someoneone to shop for you. Intelligible writing might help prevent some unpleasant surprises.
Another spelling reform that worked well is the one for Afrikaans. It was originally intended for Dutch too and was actually meant for Dutch and not Afrikaans but for some reason it never materialised and only Afrikaans got the reform. The main changes were to remove diphthongs that sounded the same, mainly compressing au, ou, ouw and auw into just ou and changing the t in tie and tion to an s because that is how you pronounce it. Another change is changing the ij to a y. ij is considered one letter and is even called Greek I or y so it makes sense why it was changed. These are only a few of the changes but most were pretty minor, but made Afrikaans a language that is very easy to spell and it is spelled 100% phonetically. I was quite surprised at how weird some of the Dutch spelling are when I learnt it and its significantly harder to remember compared to Afrikaans. However its not worse to read though, just harder to write.
There was a suggestion I'd read somewhere changing the in some words to , similarly to German. This would show the difference in sound between "näture" and "natural" for instance
4:25 it’s somewhat misleading to show Switzerland as having adopted the new spellings, because a) Switzerland never* used the ß to begin with, so “dass”, “Fass”, etc were always written with double s here, and b) Switzerland rejected many of the new spellings outright, often because the new spellings reflected strictly the pronunciations in Germany (like Majonäse) which, particularly in the case of the (many) words of French origin, does not reflect the pronunciation in Switzerland (where words of French and Italian origin tend to be pronounced fairly faithfully to their original languages). Switzerland didn’t really appreciate being significantly ignored during the reforms, and in the end, the new spellings that were adopted largely failed to catch on, and even newspapers have reverted many things back to the old spellings (like Stengel). I was in the last entering high school (gymnasium) class that officially used the old spellings. But looking at the writing of people much younger than me, it’s clear the new orthography did not stick. Disclaimer before anyone attempts to “school” me or otherwise make inapplicable comments: I’m not talking about Swiss German (Schwiizerdütsch), the Swiss dialects of the Allemanic language. I’m talking about Swiss Standard German, the Swiss dialect of standard German (Schweizer-Hochdeutsch, as I like to call it). *not technically true, but it was used inconsistently and abandoned entirely so long ago as to be irrelevant. We can at least say that in the entire time since German abandoned Fraktur type, Switzerland has never used the Eszett.
@Josodo Ist egal, da es sich um etwas anderes handelt: in der Schweiz bezeichnet man Standarddeutsch (das was wir jetzt schreiben) als „Hochdeutsch“ oder „Schriftdeutsch“, um es vom Schwiizerdütsch abzugrenzen. Das hat mit der sprachwissenschaftlichen Aufteilung von Hoch- und Niederdeutschen Dialekten und Sprachen nichts zu tun.
@Josodo Lustiger Fakt: Schweizerdeutsch ist ja eine Sammlung verwandter Dialekte der Alemannischen Sprache, und zwar hauptsächlich „Hochalemannisch“, aber teilweise „Höchstalemannisch“! 😆
Ich stimme dir zu, wobei man sagen muss: „Majonäse“ ist im ganzen deutschen Sprachraum gescheitert (nicht nur in der Schweiz) und gilt seit 2017 nicht mehr als korrekte Schreibweise. Bessere Beispiele wären vermutlich Sauce/Soße, Menu/Menü oder Portemonnaie/Portmonee.
Spanish may have a lot of strange stuff, but what I love about it is that you can 100% know how to pronounce a word just by reading it. This is helped by the fact that Spanish just has 5 sounds for its vowels, unlike English, where A for example can be pronounced in many different ways
I think that Spanish benefits from being a direct descendant of Latin (and a pretty faithful one at that), which the alphabet was originally made for. For most other languages though, it has to be adapted in order to fit, which leads to a lot of letter pairs like th or ue, diacritics, rules that alter pronunciation like the German double vowels, or nightmare orthographies like in English.
It’s not quite 100% like you say it is. I agree with you that it’s still very consistent overall, especially compared to other languages - I’d give it a solid 9/10 - but there are certainly some exceptions that ruin it. The main one is the pronunciation of the letter X - in most words it’s /ks/ (e.g. próximo, tórax), but in some weird cases it’s pronounced like the Spanish J (e.g. México). I understand that these are mostly regional words preserved for etymological reasons, but still, they ruin the otherwise consistent rule. The other big exception is how loanwords are handled. While I have no problem with Spanish spelling loanwards the same way as in the original language (e.g. jazz), or adapting them to fit their own rules (e.g. béisbol), what I don’t understand is the “half-adapted” words. For example: hándbol. Shouldn’t that be either “jándbol” or just “handball”? If you change the A into the O, why don’t you also change the H? Because the current spelling makes it look like it should be pronounced like /ˈand.bol/.
There's already basically been a spelling reform in English when the spelling was first standardised. It's just not called a “reform”, because there was no unified spelling to reform at the time. I find it pretty fascinating. Old books are funny to read, because often you need to read it out loud for it to make sense. An old cookbook called for flower, and it took me a bit to realise they meant flour. Sometimes it’s not another words, it's something like “jinerall”, and you need to sound it out. (That's “general”, by the way, written like that in a poem quoted by The Harvard Magazine in 1861 and Davy Crockett's Almanacs before that.) As long as you sound it out and know that þ is pronounced as th, you're good. I think there’s another letter that sometimes trips me up but I can’t remember it right now. (Edit: it was the ſ, it looks more like a worn out letter f in old text, but it’s pronounced like a long s.) My point is, there's no reason a spelling reform wouldn’t be possible in English, especially how you outlined it here. The four rules make a lot of sense.
Here’s the 1861 war poem, “Vurse to the Amerikan Eegel” “O burd well nown & ginerally, respeckted - all hale ! Thow art prepaired, I kalkilate, Tu stick claws constitushunal Intu the hide uv treeson (That's a GOAK! But tu prosede.) How mad yu bee Fur trators tu pull down the flagg Wich yu pertickulerly perteckt & uv wich Yu air the cheef perpriatur! How lowd Yu screem & how yu holler 4th The cri uv war!! It seems az tho' Yu 'd kill ten men & a small boy By only lookin' at them mutch. Sa, Prowd, inndignunt bein' (so too speek), Wunt yu wipe out Ccesshun & sich like Humbugg frum the starrs & stripes Uv this gellorious land uv Unkel Samm's ? Wunt yu attend tu matters & dispose Uv Davis, Boreegard, & Mistur Wise uv Virginny, & the furm in jinerall, so as tu Bennifit the health of mankind ? Ice again, & tu konclude, all hale! Sore up, thow Bird uv Fredum!!”
@Altusestmieiovis that is actually the only word I wasn’t able to fully figure out! My best suggestion is *cession* , from the word concede (basically means surrender), and the writer wants to keep fighting for their land? It’s such an unfamiliar word to me that I'm not sure if it fits in this context or not.
"And getting rid of silent letters!" These vowels have a problem, and Silent E's to blame! Instead of "ah", "eh", "ih", "aw", "uh", he makes them say their name. He's changed their sounds to A and E and I and O and U. With powers like that, just think about the damage he can do. Silent E! He changes cub into a cube! Silent E. He changes tub into a tube! He changes twin to twine, he changes can into a cane. And this brave man must stop him, before he strikes again!
Here in Switzerland, the ß was surprisingly not adapted. Also, at 4:22 you did a great job on excluding the welsh (french speaking) part of Switzerland but forgot to exclude the Tessin (Speaking Italian). Great Video though!
Well… Originally the ß was used here in Switzerland as well, but it was removed in the 1930s and 1940s (first in Zurich and then the other cantons followed). So it was adapted in Switzerland, but got removed years ago. There are several stories to why Switzerland removed it and I don’t know which one is correct. Sometimes it‘s said, that it got removed, cause we wanted a typewriter keyboard that could be used to write all languages of Switzerland, but theres wasn‘t enough space and therefore it was decided to get rid of it. Sometimes it‘s said, that it was removed to differentiate our German more from the German in Nazi Germany.
When you mentioned "developing", it really made me laugh. I assure you, every german child makes this mistake at the beginning spelling "developing" like "eloping" because for us it's the obvious pronounciation. One of the most different things in our language lessons in school is to learn and accept that many other languages don't take it serious with rules and consistency in the way the german language does :D
THIS. honestly this video showed me that apparently im pronouncing a lot of english words wrong? i only know them from reading and ofc i would pronounce them according to what ive learned about the english alphabeth and similar looking words which pronouncation i know. im glad i stopped giving fucks a few years ago, pronouncing correctly or spelling correctly is no longer that important as it is to communicate what i wanna say
I was is school when the Rechtschreibreform happened. I immediately jumped from a 4- (D-) in spelling to a 1- (A-). I remember there were lots of heated discussions among the grown-ups about the changes. Some more conservative newspapers even refused to print the new way. But I liked it from day one. There is no good reason why our spellings must ne inconsistent.
I was also in school. My grades dropped like a stone in german class, for the two years spelling still mattered. And after I finished school I never again was in a situation where I couldn't use spell check when spelling was important, and so now I just write how I want to. I think it's quite close to the old way, except that I sometimes remember to change any and all ß into ss and that I have to count out how many vowels I have to chain.
I was in school when these changes happened. It made things so much clearer. Lesser exceptions in a language are always good. I liked it a lot. Like your videos :) I am also half French, so I always have to deal with stuff like: professional (EN) - professionell (DE) - professionnel (FR) Plus one for simplifying double letters.
Many older Germans would still disagree, but that's the nature of a reform. It's also worth mentioning, that german language rules still aren't as logical as they could - and probably should - be. But what's perfect in this world? It's actually fair to say that the German spelling reform was a good idea in its second iteration.
Have you been around the last decade? How can anyone unironically say that sentence after Trump and everything that happened? You can become the fucking American President by disagreeing on facts. So why would someone who doesn't like change care for much less obvious facts, then?
@@Ginkoman2 True. And that means that there are at least 6 ways of spelling german in use in Germany alone which were all considered correct at some point in the last 30 years.
As a German, the spelling reform did some good things but also ended up making certain words look straight up ugly, for example the word ‘wallet’ Which is spelled Portemonnaie but the reform allows it to be spelled like Portmonee as well which is hurting my eye
Why would you do that? Does the make more sense to represent the /z/ sound?? only ever makes two or three sounds in English, the majority of the time it makes a /z/ sound and in some french or foreign words it makes a /ʒ/ (like in seizure) or a /tz/ sound (like in pizza). Meanwhile s can make sounds like: /s/: "see" /z/: "phase" /ʃ/: "Russia" /ʒ/: "vision"
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx But also in German the s is very diverse and even depends on the area. E.g. In Germany you often encounter /s/, /z/, /ʃ/ and even /ʒ/ depending on position and if the word is a loanword from French or another language. The same is true for the z, which is pronouced like "ts" in all native words, but in various different ways in loanwords. In Austria and Switzerland you might only encounter /s/ and /ʃ/ and no voiced variants, with the latter sound being more common than in Germany, like in the consonant clusters "rs" and "sp". I don't think English spelling can be reformed to fit every local variation and loanword.
Funny you bring up that particular spelling reform (-ize to ise), the British attempted that reform in the late 19th century, the US rejected it as did the Oxford University Press (the US disliked that the British were trying to tell us how to spell and Oxford disliked the fact that it obscured etymology, -ize words come from Greek, -ise words come from romance languages, mostly French). So now both spellings are technically correct English spellings, which is typically how our spelling reforms go: removing the 'u' from words like 'colour' and the reversing the '-re' to '-er' in words like 'centre', likewise created two spelling conventions you now have to learn. These are all proper English now, thanks to spelling reforms: 'I realize this is the wrong color.' (American English) 'I realize this is the wrong colour.' (Oxford English) 'I realise this is the wrong colour.' (Standard British English)
the more i learn about other languages the more thankful i am that spelling is so straightforward in spanish. compared to what english and german and many other languages have, spanish almost spells itself. the most "confusing" aspects about spelling in spanish are just homophones, allophones (spelling z with s, or y with ll), and tildes (but if you know the rules for tildes you can tell 90% of the time if a word has tilde or not from the pronunciation alone).
I'm german, and was in school as the 2006 reform happened... never really understood the rules between the changes, and even the 1996 changes where confusing as many older people still use some style from before then. I don't need to write in german to often, so everytime I got to write a word where I remember there being differences in spelling, it's time to ask google and hope I make sense of the answer. Honestly, this video did a better job at explaining it then the many years I had in school... and the video isn't even in german! Thanks mate for this great explanation.
My one point to the proposed reform for English is just that the pronunciation is different because of stress in the word, and the problem becomes that especially in longer words, doubling consonants makes the word a whole lot longer. And ultimately, even thought we call them 'long vowels' the distinction isn't length anymore, it's actually just stress, which the word generally informs. So 'developing' and 'eloping' are different like how 'hospital' and 'hospitality' are, which is to say, with more or less syllables, the stress appears shifted away from the 'root' position. And I don't want some weird 'hospittall' vs 'hospittalitty' distinction, and would actually rather have an accent mark on non-normal stress patterns, since the English vowel system is so messed up, and where German spelling can pretty precisely reflect vowel pronunciation in that subtle way, we just can't. We need umlauts before double letters.
I am german and intuitively I would spell the words as hospital and hospitallity. Short vowels marked in this way are rare so word length doesnt increase often. Long and short vowels has always just been about stress.
Not sure if it counts, but a major "spelling" change was when Chinese was simplified in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Very different type of writing, but much more massive changes I think.
What you also have to consider is that German did not change Latin words, but rather pronounces them correctly, which is why Germans can read all Latin in English without too much difficulty since it is basically written the same just that we made the C (which in Latin was (in the Italian/ or nowadays Romansch (Schweitzer Dialect des Lateins)) mostly pronounced as k) to K where it was pronounced as such, which fucks with my head every time I translate any thought from English to German or vise versa. Updating Latin spelling is not a good idea if you want other to use you’re (British) version of English. What many people don’t know is that the spelling change also came with a -maybe unintentional but probably intentional- change in what pronunciation was considered „correct“ changing or killing most dialect and removing large chunks of Germanic heritage vocabulary in favor of the „proper“ word which often was Latin, Franco or Anglo in origin. There were also 3 Reforms which for a long time lead to confusion since not every teacher learned or/and taught them. English spelling also is easier if you know the basic spelling rules of Latin and more importantly French. Nobody cares but thought I’d give my 2Cents on the matter since I have some experience with Germanistik.
German changed the written form of loanwords so that a german can pronounce them following german spelling. English kept the foreign form of loanwords and just tries to wing it.
2:44 In „Ofen“, the „o“ should not only be long, but closed like in „yawn“ (Britisch Received Pronounciation). Your „Ofen“ wasn‘t understandable, because your „o“ wasn‘t closed enough and it has to be one straight sound. I like your video, so I gave it a thumb up. And your idea to implement more double consonants in English is not bad. ;)
With English being a heavily mixed language, I feel as though any spelling reform would have to take into account the root language of each word. Are there any other languages that are as heavily influenced by other languages such as English? Or close seconds?
I mean the thing with english is that the problems are so deep that any regularizing changes would have a good case for extending for the rest of its combinations. Like, Thorn and Ed’s wouldn’t created massive problems. And “completely redoing the vowel system” would only be true *on paper*. And languages that are highly phonemic still represent their irregularities nakedly and people just have to deal with them, just as they do in speech. And we deal with homophones all the time. In orthographic reform, one has to accept those sorts of things. And i think with English, as has been seen with the internet and typesetting, simplification is the way to go. The Thorn/Edh examples you brought up have already moved on informally for some of them: Tho, *thot, thru, tuff. The way vowels and diphthongs are represented are also a core issue. Additionally-and i know this is a polarizing opinion-at some point the importing in of foreign words unadaptedly is unwieldy and impractical, especially given on how much of the false assumed commonality it relies on (which starkly breaks down quickly with languages that have very large consonant inventories, such as Taa).
I feel like a spelling reform for German was possible because of proximity and scale, and thats the same reason why it isn’t possible for English. English already has two major camps, US and UK English, I think the US could do this just fine since they will accept change when their version of English was built around making more sense, but the UK is more stubborn and so are the Commonwealth countries, all you do is risk creating a third spelling rift in English resulting in more confusion. As an Aussie who has to deal with both versions for different sites who don’t offer my English, I would be very confused if I had to now spell the UK English because now Australian English becomes a way more distinct form of English just by not being asked or at least not agreeing on said changes. This is what I would call the mass bastardisation of English as now no one knows how to spell words if not British or American, the Canadians may cave to the Yanks for christ sake, while Australia and New Zealand both ask South Africa and India wtf we are meant to do, chaos I tell you chaos. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
We've got a spelling reform in french that was very nice, imo. (got rid of the useless "i" in "oignon", of the accent in "û" wherever it doesn't bring anything, etc.) What scares me is that there was so much defensive reactions to this reform, like it's an attack to the purity/integrity/history of the language, we will all write like idiots, and so on.
@@marcusaureliusf the reform happened more than 30 years ago and most people including french teachers don't fully know what was part of the reform and as far as i know both spellings are kept in use (old and reformed) so yeah little is being achieved in French and it's a historical problem the language was made to be hard to write etc.
I was looking for a random video to watch during a pause and I was surprised by this by the end of the video! I have a B1 level in german..what about some video talkinga about the transition between gothic stilish fonts and the "regular ones" we have today? great video, thanks!
Weirdly all these rules really are existent in my head and consistent and you just made me aware of them hahah being fluent in a language really is weird, you never think about anything. But I also apply it to English subconsciously apparently because I ALWAYS misspell developed
Your suggested reform is good imo. Another proposed idea where /ɛ/ monothong is allways written which I also think could grow threw. I wish that "ough" would change to better. It's allready done by some.
That's another dialectal difference (the "cot-caught merger"). In dialects that haven't undergone this merger (like Received Pronunciation British English), "lop" and "lawp" are pronounced differently.
Portuguese, both the european and Brazilian varieties, has gone through many spelling reforms throughout the 20th century, to the extent a 19th century text feels extremely weird to read (you can still read it, it's just unconfortable). the "Grammatica Philosophica da Lingua Portugueza(1822)" would now be spelt "Gramática Filosófica da Língua Portuguesa", "finaes" became "finais", "Brazil" became "Brasil", "directo" became "direto" and many other changes. The most recent reform was in 1990, which wanted to bring closer the two varieties, and ironically made spelling less consistent in both of them, because each side had to make acommodations for the other. Brazilians had to sacrifice the stress mark in "idéia (ideia)" that meant it was pronounced different from "sereia" and the portuguese lost the mute consonat in "director (diretor)" that meant the "e" was not reduced.
Spanish also made some recent reforms in the 2010's about the stress mark because some words don't follow the stress mark rules (e.g., "sólo" vs. "solo"). These words are very common so they were just accepted as exceptions. So basically they just said that writing the words without the stress mark would not be considered incorrect. Pretty uneventful.
I must say, I really hate the replacing of 'ph' with 'f', it obscures the Greek origins of the word and, worse than that, just looks ugly. But maybe it's not as horrific to native Portuguese speakers as it would be to someone like me who only knows English, Greek, and Latin.
@@costakeith9048 The fact that Latin generally dropped Ph for F already in most cases makes it easy for Latin languages. Germanic and other languages have the issue of direct borrowing from Greek vs transmission through Latin - and for historical-cultural reasons, I'd use the Latin style, on top of the fact that Ph is almost solely used in Greek-origin words and is otherwise completely foreign to Germanic languages.
What do you do about ch and sh? /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ they don't make the s or k sound: like in ce, /s/ and ca /k/ and then about kind (which if you replace k with c (cind, it'd be /sɪnd/(if I transcribed that correctly) (which is sinned, so it'd be a homophone) (in english specifically) I think that english orthography would need a whole makeover, rather than ridding letters from the language. Diacritics could work
@@luckneh5330 eh, probably represent /ʃ/ with "ch" and /tʃ/ with "tch" I'm aware that would make words like "hatch" spell as "hattch" which looks really weird, but this whole idea was a joke anyway so why not make the concept even dumber? lol
this is a great video! i remember the spelling reform going into effect just after i started going to school :D and i do very much prefer it to the way it was before, the consintency of pronounciation is just satisfying. they did change some other stuff, like some single words: photo became foto (picture) for example. the one that broke my heart was the change they made to dolphin: from "delphin" to "delfin". i dont know why but i really prefer the old way for that, it looks just so much nicer. thankfully im out of school now and can continue to keep delphin alive :D
lol I was a little bit confused when I started reading, as you have the Brazilian flag as your profile picture I actually thought you were talking about the Portuguese language
As a german who grew up with the new spelling rules, I’m glad that I didn’t have to learn and use the old spelling versions. Every time I read an older german text, I just see how confusing they sometimes were. Sadly our grammar rules are still terrible…
Portuguese had a spelling reform (which took ages as it had to be agreed with Brazil). I'd love to see a video on it! Learning Portuguese, and reading childrens' books for practice. Some of the books in the local library are quite old and I find I'm wondering if spelling might be the reason why I sometimes can't find the words in the dictionary.
Isn't brazilian Portuguese considered a separate language nowadays? There have to be at least enough differences that both, the brazilian and portoguesean version are offered in language selections.
Please don't forget that because of the double consonants rule and the way word creation works in german we literally have words with triple consonants. Best examples probably are Schifffahrt or Geschirrreiniger.
One of the problems with trying to reform spelling (which usually means trying to make it more phonetic) is that the more closely coupled the spelling is to pronunciation, the farther away spelling becomes from the various regional dialects and accents. Somewhat imprecise spellings provide a sort of abstraction layer between the underlying phonology and the actual pronunciation in a dialect.
@@Yusuketh443 In languages where different countries have different dialects (like German, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, just to name a few), it matters a lot.
One former rule with the "ß" was, that a word can never end with "ss". That is why words like "dass" and "muss" weren't possible but were "daß" and "muß".
@@loganlloyd6930 Yes, which is why they fixed it. But german is full of stupid rules that are overcorrected for. Getting rid of them is nice. Next get rid of n-declination, overcorrection of adjective noun combinations..
An easier way to solve this is to introduce accent marks in English and adjust them to fit the rules of English. For example, we could use circumflex like French. "Anger" would not need one. But then we could write "Ângel" with one. We could say; "the farmer taught his sow to sôw". English used to have what German calls the umlaut although English had a different name for it that I can't remember now. It was used to show when double vowels were pronounced separately such as "coöperate". It could be used in words like "reädmit" or "reörder". Rather than changing spelling, this way, we'd just have to remember which marks to use.
Your described usage of umlaut is also in French. Signaling that a combination of letters is not creating the sound the usual combination rules would create. Like in aigüe, aïe, héroïne.
This is also how the umlaut is used in Spanish! In Spanish ‘gue’, ‘gui’ make a single sound (like guest and guilt in English), but ‘güe’ and ‘güi’ means that the u and e/i are pronounced separately, so it sounds like /gwe/ and /gwi/
I think you get the umlauts wrong. It's not a name for a certain letter, but a change in sounding, due to some other sound in or around the word (that might not be present anylonger in the modern language). In English there are umlauts, but mostly not orthographically marked like in German, e.g. the difference between man/men is due to an umlaut (in German Mann/Männer). Most umlauts are just written like their non-umlaut variant, but differenciated in speech.
@@ShonnMorris I know, you argued to use special accents on letters to show that they don't form a diphthong with another letter, without changing the sound of the letter that uses the accent symbol. An umlaut on the other hand is a change of a sound though. Edit: To further clarify: You wrote that English used sth similar to what is called an umlaut in German, but what I percieved from your explanation is that it isn't even close to what an umlaut is. The whole similarity is about German umlauts often using some sort of accent mark (not all of them do)
as someone born in germany and also someone who pretty much went through the spelling reform while being in school, I have to say it was quite confusing at first. I still remember learning having to write "daß" instead of "dass" and a year later suddenly not anymore lmao. And then when I grew older I slowly learned more and more changes that didn't make sense to me like "telephon" or "telefon" But! Alas this video showed me a completely new perspective that my naive brain all these years forgot about, consistency in spelling! That also explains the "telephon" into "telefon" change itself now, since ph is usually used in the beginning of words, I believe? I'm not a language expert, but this video surely enlightened a little area I haven't seen before, thanks for that! Great video!
The german speaking part of switzerland got rid (or never had?) of the eszet. As a german speaking swiss i didn't know what all the fuss was about. And thanks to you as an english speaker i now do. PS the lack of use of the eszet makes everyone aware that you're swiss.
4:12 That's not fully correct. In Switzerland we don't use the "ß" at all and as far as I know never did or at least haven't used it in a very long time.
yes this is true, Switzerland did technically adopt the reform but maintains its "in der Schweiz kann man immer ss schreiben". The reform just didn't really change anything there lol
Honestly i think the spelling reform that i like the most is bringing back þ and ð, not because it’s just a better way of doing things, but just because i like the symbols lol
I feel like English just might be too far gone for any meaningful spelling reforms. It has a much more complicated history and evolution than, for example, the German language.
That was a good suggestion for spelling reform in English! I’ve been thinking deeply about how it would be possible to reform English spelling. The most major problem I can see is that it’s now the de-facto language of the internet and also that now, many American vernaculars would be almost forced upon the British isles (this is also an issue that would also face the Americans should a British focussed spelling reform happen, or at least I believe). It’s been left too late to make reasonable changes. Also, potentially the different origins of many of the words we have today whether they are Germanic or Romance in origin could complicate things to where one rule would work for one, and not the other. However, if anybody can reform it to any useful degree, then I’m 100% for it.
As a German who has only lived in the age of the spelling reform I can confidently say that I absolutely detest it and I still use "daß" unless I have to write something official. I am proud of the letter ß and hate seeing it get used so much less. Languages should have their irregularities and inconsistencies and quirks. That is the fun of learning languages! If we wanted to just make things easier we could simply start writing everything the way it sounds. But nah. I like my daß and keep using it. Just like it's "Potential" and not "Potenzial" and "Photografie" and not "Fotografie".
The old rules made no sense, tho. The sole purpose of ß is to have a way of writing the long vowel - sharp s combination, in every other context it makes no sense to use it. Spelling changes, that's just how it is. If nobody adapted to it we'd still be stuck with Middle High German
@@leDespicable I agree they made no sense. Using similar logic we could get rid of irregular verbs too though. I think it is absolutely beautiful when languages have exceptions and inconsistencies. Latin has so many words that have weird af declinations and special meanings when used with a special word etc. I wouldn't want it any other way, I still love Latin and view it as the best candidate for a Europe-wide language should the EU ever decide to adopt something as a official EU language. Languages should be allowed to have irregularities and inconsistencies. Languages don't have to be easy either. If they should, let's abandon our intricate case system we have in Germany as well. Let's abolish irregular verbs and get rid of grammatical gender. We could do all of that to make things easier. Cause sure it makes no sense that in German the table is male, the corpse is female, the hole neuter, beauty female and hate male etc. Are you in favour of making langauage as easy as possible and eradicating any and all imperfections, exceptions and irregularities? Lastly: Yes. Language and Spelling change. I acknowledge that. But that change is only ever brought forward by those speaking the language. It doesn't have to change. If people were committed enough to it we could keep languages entirely unchanged if we wish, except for some minor changes like adding words for new inventions etc. "If nobody adapted to it we'd still be stuck in Middle High German". Yes. And why would that be a bad thing? Nothing wrong with it. Language ever evolves. Sometimes for the worse, sometimes the better. Which of the two it does is a matter of subjective opinion. In my opinion right now I think it is developing for the worse. And I am entitled to speak in whichever manner I deem appropriate and fitting - hence I choose the old spelling. Nothing wrong with it.
Dir ist schon bewusst, dass "Photographie" und Potential nicht falsch sind, oder? Du darfst beides schreiben, hat nix mit neuer Rechtschreibung zu tun. Die neueren Formen sind nur zusätzlich anerkannt. "daß" macht nur leider null Sinn innerhalb der Rechtschreibung. Es führt zu Widersprüchen. Außerdem stimmt es überhaupt nicht, dass ß weniger vorkommt. Andere Wörter, die früher mit ss geschrieben wurden, schreibt man heute immerhin mit ß. Strasse -> Straße.
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Let's take a look at your proposed reform...
How should we treat vowels before consonant clusters? Let's at first assume they are short just like before double letters and therefore leave words like 'anger', 'limb', and 'cost' alone. But what about the long vowels in 'angel', 'climb', or 'host'?
In order to maintain consistency, we have to spell all consonants before short vowels as double letters even when in clusters or at the end of a word. So we get 'annger', 'limmb', and 'cosst'. Hmmm.
We'd also get absolute abominations like 'proppossittion', 'addammannt', and 'annimmossitty'. Or should I say 'abbomminnations'? And how are you supposed to maintain the intervocalic voicing of the 's' in 'proposition'?
Regularising the use of single and double letters on its own doesn't solve the underlying issue of vowel length ambiguity in English orthography, all the while making writing a more arduous and space-inefficient task, as well as ironically making reading more difficult as well.
Spelling reform proposal aside, your videos are excellent and you deserve more recognition.
I would tend to agree with you, and exclusively keep the reform to set words where there is already precedent. Like "metallic"/"intervocallic". Honestly I'm surprised more people haven't criticised it yet, it's not a very good idea tbh. But for what it's worth, it isn't supposed to be applied consistently across the orthography.
@@kklein I would personally opt for modifying the vowels themselves in order to clarify both vowel length and quality simultaneously. As ridiculous of a video it was, apandah's own take on spelling reform mentioned this idea which I can't disagree with. (I sincerely apologise if you aren't acquainted with apandah, lmfao)
I think maybe diacritics could help with this, specifically the line one. So climb would become clīmb and angel āngel
Simple answer, diacritics. English needs them, honestly. There's a lot of ways in which they help english be more accessible. Name Explain made a great video on the issue:
ruclips.net/video/Ap2A4A6RzAY/видео.html
Ääs a geerman who löörned arabic ei would propoos "eingel", "cliimb" äänd "hoost". Problem with the lääst uon iß "oo" meiks än "uu" sound... wuei not wreit it ääs uu.
Aal of this is still eesilyy reedabl, ääs theer iß ounlyy uon leter moor. "Buut" would stil be red leik "boot" bei someuon wuu speeks eenglish.
As one of the 10 german speaking people in Belgium, I can tell you that we do use the new spelling. Whoever made the map/was the source for it, probably just forgot that we exist. Something you get used to after a while.
Find irgendwie krass, dass es deutschsprachige Belgier gibt, weil man wirklich nie was darüber hört… Macht ihr denn mehr in Deutschland oder im Rest der Wallonie?
I live in Eastbelgium aswell and you are completely right
The map also suggests that switzerland uses ß, which they categorically don't.
@@bintisf Hängt davon ab, ich wohne nah an Aachen. Dann teilt sich das auf, je nachdem was praktischer ist. Die Eifler wohnen relativ ausm Schlag was große Städte angeht, die fahren auch noch viel nach Luxemburg.
Film und Fernsehen ist aber fast exklusiv deutsch (außer bei Eltern, die ihren Kindern französisch beibringen wollen, oder den 3 Leuten die das Lokalprogramm vom BRF gucken)
@@bintisf Die Deutschsprachigen Belgier sind ein Überbleibsel vergangener Zeiten, früher war dort die Deutsche Grenze ein wenig weiter westlich, nach dem ersten Weltkrieg wurde diese Grenze leicht nach Osten verlegt und so gibt es nun Deutschsprachige Gemeinden in Belgien. Diese Region ist generell bekannt als Eupen-Malmedy oder Ostbelgien.
German here. The spelling reform happened when I was inbetween elementaroy and middle school. For me the new spelling rules where immediately understandable and way more predictable than the former spelling convention. That spelling reform was a very well thought out move.
I was in Grundschule back then. At Gymnasium however, it seemed to me that teachers/schools/society decided what is right and what's not just depending in how they liked it. I am 32 years now, graduated Uni, work in a job where E-Mails are an important part of every day and I am still a freestyler concerning commas, spelling and the use of the "ß". To be honest, the Rechtschreibreform is a big confusion until today, probably for all my life. 😅 Liebe Grüße aus Mosbach (Baden).
@@DeKrischa : The sister of my grandmother, born 1916, wrote up to her death about ten years ago in Sütterlin ( Kurrent?).
No.
@@DeKrischa Warum bin ich nicht überrascht, dass das von einem Badner kommt. Da wurde das ja sogar zum Landesmotto erklärt. Zitat: "Wir können alles, außer Hochdeutsch".
@@DeKrischa Ich komme auch auch aus Mosbach und ich finde die Rechtschreibreform super 👍
You're literally the only person who has been able to explain ß in such a way I can comprehend it properly. Thanks a lot!!
It's not perfectly accurate for the old spelling rules, though. It used to be so that you would put ß for double S when they occurred at the end of a word *or word segment*, i.e., "bißchen" or "Haß" (but "hassen"). That has to do with its history as a combination of long S and "final S" (Schluss-S or as they would have put it back then, Schluß-S), since Eszett really evolved from two different ligatures (sz and ss). With this spelling, it was very clear where the syllable ended. It was biß-chen. Today we spell it "bisschen", because the i is short. However, this leads to a situation where you could read it as "bis-schen" with a long i, since sch represents the German "sh" sound.
The new rules however are more consistent in most places.
@@ez45 Sometimes I see a street with a sign "Schloß" written on it.
@@castleclasher1236 yeah, street signs can be far older, and some Schlösser don't bother changing it in their names at all.
Ebenso.
@@castleclasher1236 Proper nouns (names) won't change. New streets and towns and whatever will use the new spelling and the odd one might be changed, but overall I suspect proper nouns won't change much.
I myself live in a city which uses an old spelling. I doubt it will change any time soon.
I've been told my spelling grades jumped up a lot in third grade, simply because my most common spelling mistakes were no longer wrong.
New spelling is more consistent with the rules.
Don't change yourself. Change the system.
In a sense, a child who only knows the basic rules of a language's orthography is likely still able to write their native language phonetically, just represented through their current 'simple' knowledge of such orthography. So, in a sense, if 'proper' spelling ends up matching what a child (who only knows the previous basic rules of your language's orthography) would gravitate to when they hear something and try to spell it, then it must be a good thing because that means your orthography's now simple and intuitive enough to be understood even within the small span of a child's knowledge of writing.
As a German "devellopping" just looks like your typical high-school student spelling mistake. But oh how it would increase our grades in english :D
Buisness es ushual
Isn't that a testament to which spelling is more intuitive? I mean, just think of how much more easy it is to do that "mistake" than to misspell "ellopping" or misspell "misppel". If you see these 2 latter ones you pretty much know that that person is typing on a keyboard with inconsistently bouncy keys, because that's the only explanation that makes sense (apart from them being more dyslexic than anyone else in the whole history of spelling or being both high and drunk on some very hallucinogenic substances).
@@Pystro You could say its more intuitive yes, but the creator made that difference to be more like the German reform so in the case of this original commenter being German, its more intuitive to him because he is used to alot of double letters in the German language. I would be interested how other languages would feel trying to learn English with these changes. On the other hand cases like stopping, hopping, cropping use the -ping suffix without omitting the extra p so maybe it is more intuitive as 'developping', its hard to say (though hoping is ofc already a word).
@@OhhLoz I may be equally biased because I'm German as well, but I would assume that "devellopping" would look far less wrong than "misppel" to native English speakers as well.
@@Pystro Yea definitely, misppel looks really odd compared to devellopping
"Verein der Leute mit Meinungen"
Ah yes. Twitters worst enemy. The gathering of people with opinions.
That IS Twitter
@@AAArnold I mean, Twitter can be twitters worst enemy sometimes
@@Fuer64 That's the concept. Discourse
Sounds a bit like monty python...
@@sdrawkcab_emanresu Twitter doesn't do "discourse", at least not charitable or beneficial forms of it.
The German reform worked, in part, because it already had a regulated and reformed language to work on. The last German orthographic Reform had been less than 100 years earlier, culling most of the real harsh outliers that English still struggles with, but not even the vowel shift shit, which German just never spelled out like english anyway. Also, German reforms have a lot less trouble getting hold since they mainly concern Germany and than allow Austria and Switzerland - who already have their own slightly different rules - to adapt. In contrast, english Reforms need to be heard in England, the US, Canada, Australia and more.
True about needing to get different lands on board. But I can say that what’s spoken in Austria and southern Germany is quite dissimilar to what’s spoken in northern Germany. The spelling reflects northern German pronunciation. For example, in Bavaria they say “ee bee” but they still spell it “ich bin.”
So I guess I’m saying it’s possible for English, even though the different countries have very different dialects.
@@anniehasting1133 Slight correction, "ich bin" is "I bin" in Bavarian, so not quite the pronunciation you gave.
@@leDespicable ich kenne viele die i bi sagen. Abhängig von der Stadt, vielleicht
@@leDespicable Standard-German is a mix of many dialects, that doesn't mean that dialects are wrong. Standard-German is a writing language, with no spelling-rule unlike many people think. Also there are no writing rules anymore, only recommendations.
@@anniehasting1133 It resembles middle-german, because it was contrived there. (Das Hochdeutsche wurde ja von sächsischen Kanzlisten erfunden.) Because of this, north-german dialects are also very dissimilar to the contrived unified spelling. You spell it "Pferd" not "Fead".
A lot of spelling reforms try to reinvent when they should be trying to update by following how spoken language has evolved
I think that moust riformz try to reprizent the actuel pronunsiation.
@@juandiegovalverde1982 and retracing its evolution usually does a better job of that than just trying to phonetically transcribe a dialect with no regard for context - sounds changes within a dialect tend to be fairly consistent, which is why it's possible to reconstruct extinct languages from their descendants.
@@juandiegovalverde1982 acshuel*
@@_apsis It depends on how faithfully you want to display the pronunciation of modern English.
@@_apsis And remember that there are two main dialects, General American and Received Pronunciation.
The other successful spelling reform is Malay and Indonesian in 1972. We manage to change the mess of different spelling from the two standards, like the word "Chuchu" and "Tjutju" into "Cucu" (means grandchild). I agree with your criteria for spelling reform because in this spelling reform we can still read old spelling, and it's easier than previous spelling.
Portuguese also had a successful reform at the start of the millenium
It was even spelt 'tjoetjoe' in Malaysia!
As a half German, half Indonesian I say you are absolutely right. Indonesian orthography is amazing, Indonesian learners (which are also “quite a few” Indonesians because Bahasa Indonesia is a lingua franca) can most of the time successfully guess how a word is spoken. It’s the anti-english!
I've heard the Indonesian language be praised for this before and I love it.
We should start a linguistic revolution: Either we get a spelling reform, or we all make German and or Indonesian the new main international languages.
@@AL-qe4qc it rarely though, but malaysia and indonesia recieved people from each other country pretty often at the time.
Malaysia spelling are mostly based on English because of British while Indo is dutch based.
The joke I always say about English is that the spelling is so bad we literally have contests called “spelling bees” to see who can master English. The irony is that no one realizes how hard it is.
Although IPA is called international,but I think it’s made for the English terrible spelling.😂Because the case of other language written in Latin is much better.Even some such as Spanish almost don’t use it for foreign students.😂
Conventional IPA for English is just as bad. English has mostly diphthongs with a few monophthongs, yet many of the diphthongs are transcribed as if they were monophthongs, confusing learners more. E.g. "coup" is pronounced [kʰʊu̯] rather than what the notation /kuː/ suggests, which is like the German "Kuh" [kʰuː] ("cow").
@@DoodiePunk are you forgetting accents and dialects? not everyone pronounces these words in the same way.
@@DoodiePunk I say it as ku:
I'm apart of the Appalachian dialect, and I want ə to replace 'a. TH -> DH. Words like smooth, turn more into smoov. The -> Dhə would work rather well.
One thing to mention: Switzerland doesn‘t use the ß at all. We allways write „ss“ instead. So here people already wrote „dass“ before 1996.
For most situations it goes absolutely fine. Only for „Massen“ and „Maßen“ and „Busse“ and „Buße“ it could lead to missunderstandings.
There are dozens or even hundrets words more, not only Busse and Massen. It only goes fine in most situations because of the context.
Er darf nicht mehr mit dem Auto fahren, er muss dafür Busse tun.
I literally saw a Swiss advertisement for alcohol where it said "In Massen genießen". That's supposed to mean "Enjoy in moderation", but it reads exactly the same as "Enjoy in abundance"
@@Friek555 That's most certainly intentional
@@Friek555 „geniessen“ probably didn‘t have an ß either
I remember when we read an old book(Wilhelm tell) in german class and one of the characters name was "geßler" but pronounced [gεslɐ] and everyone pronounced it [ge:slɐ]
Yes exactly! Though names weren't changed so geßler is running around with an unreformed name to this day.
Ar yu Germen?
@@juandiegovalverde1982 I mean his family name is "Klein" (german for "small" or "little") .
It's like asking a user named "C da Silva" or "Pereira" if he is Portuguese. Sure could be a Cylonese or Brazilian guy or some other nation...but a Portuguese family connection is obviously there.
While people with Spanish usernames are all Mexican, obviously. An American guy convinced me.
just by making a quick search for german diaspora, one can see that just because someone has a German surname doesn't mean they're German. there are plenty of Schneiders, Kleins, Schmidts, Kuhn, Konder, etc, etc throughout the Americas. Speciallly in South Brazil and Argentina.
@@TremereTT It's actually originally Hungarian Yiddish! Which is obviously very closely related to German :)
Another problem with English spelling reforms is that the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, etc. would all have to agree to change. Otherwise it would get even more confusing, especially considering spelling between these countries already have some widely debated differences.
Edit: changed exorcisms to especially
Imagine the resistance form all the "pround americans" because someones tries to change their language
@@VorteX-ox2fm Well ironically Americans have made the best attempt at English language reform to date by dropping the silent u in certain words like colour, labour, etc.
@@ginch8300 You guys also changer the -re to -er. Like "center".
@@locacharliewong Not American, but also that as well.
This is IMO the biggest problem with english spelling reforms, the whole point of the written language is that it doesn't care about dialect or accent, just as how chinese writing works (worked? idk) as a bridge between entirely separate languages.
Which raises an interesting question: How feasible would it be to create a modern pan-indo-european written language that could work with several different spoken langauges?
Or a bit easier, how about a pan-germanic written language? Pan-scandinavian?
One note: While the 1996 reform (and the 1901 one before that) were major reforms, German spelings are constantly changing on a small scale. Every few years or so, words that have gone through significant changes over the years are being overhauled to add new optional spellings. Not much fuss is ever made about that because it usualy hits words that are infrequent so keeping an unusual spelling alive would be pointless.
Oh, one thing English can adapt directly from the German spelling reform: Just get rid of the "ph" and replace it with "f". There is no reason for the ph to exist. It is a spelling convention derived from a language that doesn't even use the Latin alphabet and denotes a differentiation that doesn't exist in English (bilabial v labiodental fricative).
I actually like ph though... I grew up with the spelling reform and still prefer using it when I can get away with it.
I have to disagree on the "not much fuss about it" part, there are definitely complains or people mocking about things like "Kommas", "Kaktusse","Taxis" or "Pizzas" in the Duden.
@@MrDavibu Yeah, but that is grammar, not orthography. Grammar is a much more sensitive matter. What I am talking about is stuff like the option to leave out the silent e in "gerade"/"grade".
but the replacing ph with f in german thing is also inconsistent
_Photographie_ turned into _Fotografie_ , but _Philosophie_ or _Physik_ didn't turn into _Filosofie_ and _Füsik_
@@DukeDukeGo But those are actually pronounced differently (I'm pretty sure), where the ph makes a softer sound than the f, like Philosophie vs Film. But for some newly introduced words like Photovoltaik (fancy word for solar panels), that line got blurred again. But whoever came up with that word anyway, why was a Solaranlage not good enough.
Bro this video was so good and high quality that i thought it must be semi-viral with hundreds of thousands of views, and i was quite surprised by the number of views you got! This video is amazing, straight to the point, and I 100% agree with the point you made. Props to you!
and yet still my most viewed video... life is hard my friend. Thank you so much for the nice comment :)
Same, this is the kind of content I'd expect from a channel with tens of thousands of subscribers. Let's hope the algorithm picks this one up
@@JeegsVideoDump Well the algorithm just suggested this channel to me today and I binge watched all the videos.
I assume I'm not the only one the video was suggested to.
Well, now it has 140.000 views!
@@xyzz232 whoop same here!
As a german I automaticly write many english words with double letters in places where there aren´t any supPosed to be. I think the reason is because I started learning english in 3rd school grade, so subconsciously rules of german spelling intermixed with english ones (I had english for 9 years in school and german for 12). Also like mentioned in the last bit of the video for me it makes more sensce.
Happened to me as well.
By the way, it might help if you try to practice english sentence structure. I noticed you put that "any" in the wrong place. The thing is, English has no genitiv, akkusativ and dativ cases, so it relies on the position of the word in a sentence to provide extra meaning. Also, you should not leave out all the double letters (automatically, supposed).
Good luck!
The double letter rule in English is different between the US and UK too, just to make it more confusing
Eg UK travelled and US traveled
Spanish must look incredibly weird to you since many cognates drop repeated consecutive letters. Spanish spelling and grammar is easier than English, but I always appreciate how English does not gender *every* inanimate object.
Could just be your German accent in English. Judging by your grammar (which good on a technical level, but has flaws in syntax a native speaker wouldn't commit) I deduce there to be a good chance you're having an audible accent too. In English the best approach (imo) is to memorize words by image, not by system; think Kanjis in Japanese.
Don’t worry I would understand your English.
I'm german and you just explained to me that there actually is a reason we use our all time favorite letter "ß"
Great job with the video!
Ñ!
suppose we invent another letter just to distinguish long from short vowels ... ß-fetishism to the max. and just inventing seven new letters for the long vowels would be less work and less harmful
@@mathiaslist6705 Having a marker on the vowel for one l(ong or short) form, similar to french, would already work well.
@@HappyBeezerStudios So you imagine something like ö or ü with three dots or a Hungarian style solution?
The thing about proposed English spelling reforms is, there always will be a counterargument to any proposal ever made and the reason for that is simple: no one seems to agree what they are actually trying to achieve.
You'd have to decide whether to prioriatize morphology/ethymology or phonology and just stick with it. If you choose phonology, you'd just have to deal with irregularities like "solem" but "solemnity" (just like Polish deals with irregularities like "stół" (table) but "stołu" (of the table) and Turkish writes "kebap" (nominative singular) but "kebaba" (dative singular)). Then you could start looking at how words are actually pronounced versus how they are written. Yes, you can get rid of the letter X if you want - who cares that "taks" would look like a plural of the hypothetical word "tak". So do verbs like "tells" or "falls" but people who speak English, well, speak English and know that they aren't. And they would know that there is no such word as "tak", especially when context is given. Although as a non-native English speaker, I can vouch that the letter X is the least of our concerns when learning English. And if you wish to reform the spelling of vowels or consonants like "wh", you would have to choose one dialect to base the orthography on, there's no going around that. Or create a different orthography for every dialect, sure. And if you choose to prioritize morphology and ethymology... well, that's basically what English spelling is now.
These are not easy decisions but they would have to be made to even start thinking about any successful spelling reform. And you would have to have considerable courage to make them, the kind of courage that no one in the English speaking world seems to have.
Personally, I think a good place to start would be loanwords. Words like "beauty" or "group" aren't spelled weirdly just because English spelling is weird, they're weird because they kept the original spelling of the language(s) (in this case French) the were borrowed from, and in those languages those spellings are perfectly reasonable. But for some reason, English decided to keep them as they were and that's only one of the many reasons for the oddities of English spelling. But if, like you said, we should focus on individual words, why not start with them?
Thank you! This comment makes more sense then the video itself.
I fully agree, although i would like to state that the spelling of ‘beauty’ does not make sense in french. We spell ‘beau’ but say ‘bo’
i completely disagree - e.g. lead ... if its a metal, its pronounced led, if its a hint lead. there is absolutely no way for anyone to know how to say the word without context - and im pretty sure neither one is a loanword (both are of germanic origin). so if you read a sentence starting with lead.. you have to check the context first, before you can make a decision on how to pronounce it. how is that a thing?
there are words, which are pronounce the same, but written differently: see, sea. which one is the loanword?
another example: car, care, cat, can. why is the "a" in car not spelled differently? ...and dont get me started with can, can´t and cannot... its the same word pronounced differently without any indication! in german it would be cän, can´t cännot - that way everyone instantly knows how to say it. why is it so difficult to just write it as it is spoken?
pronounciations is completely random in english. the worst part of learning english.
@@tchop6839 The combination "au" and "eau" are consistently pronounced /o/ so it "makes sense." What doesn't make sense is English keeping the spelling but saying it as /ju/
Great comment. You've hit the nail on the head.
There is far too much rift between the two dominant standard dialects of English (RP and General American) not to mention all the dialects across the Anglophone world. Phonology-based reform is out of question, imo, in our current geopolitical and cultural reality.
1:03 fun fact: The in phlegmatic was originally silent as well (the word was written fleumatik or flematik among other variants in Middle English, all without ). It was only after the spelling was changed to it's modern form, that the pronunciation changed to reflect this new spelling.
I remember how everyone was angry about the reform back then and there are still people who claim that they will never get used to it...but I guess by now, most people have gotten used to it, also due to autocorrect. Even if you have learned the "old system" like I did, when you are writing and word is constantly correcting your mistakes, eventually you get used to the new one.
"and word is constantly correcting your mistakes"
They are not mistakes - that is how language actually evolves - not by some bureaucrats dictating how to write.
@@ABaumstumpf what are you on about?
spelling reforms (outside of France lol) are mostly done in order to incorporate natural changes of language into the "official rules"
so the mistakes they were talking about weren't mistakes because the system was too slow to catch up to the natural evolution of language, they were mistakes of someone who themselves hadn't caught up to the changes which did already happen naturally and were subsequently codified in the official rules
Had the same experience living in the united states after learning British english, eventually i just got tired fighting with autocorrect and got used to the American spelling
As a lifelong bad speller, I honestly think that autocorrect is partially why I improved my spelling after having finished school.
@@Mmmm1ch43l The 2 german changes that were the focus of this video were the opposite of your claim - they made the way people actually wrote the "wrong" way.
2:51 I've been learning German for a couple years now, and I never realised this rule, of any of these rules for that matter, I just sort of picked it up intuitively.. very interesting, and well made video!
I think it would also be worth addressing separately more drastic spelling reforms where, for example, the entire script changes (Turkey, post-Soviet Azerbaijan), and how people deal with those
Mongol
𐑨𐑯𐑛 𐑞𐑨𐑑 𐑥𐑱 𐑚𐑰 𐑞𐑩 𐑒𐑱𐑕 𐑓𐑹 𐑱𐑙𐑜𐑤𐑦𐑖 𐑦𐑓 𐑞𐑩 𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯 𐑨𐑤𐑓𐑩𐑚𐑧𐑑 𐑒𐑨𐑗𐑧𐑟 𐑪𐑯
(translation for people who don't read the shavian alphabet in the Read More)
and that may be the case for english if the shavian alphabet catches on
Being one of the 10 people in Belgium who speak German I can confirm that the spelling reform got adapted here
Because culturally East Belgium is dependent on Germany. Diverging from German spelling while 99% of the books you read in schools are from Germany would make no sense.
You are the second Belgian German speaker I find on this comment section. Does it mean that 20% of your community has watched this video?
@@osasunaitor Including Joshi I have seen 3 so far. It is possible that all of them are gathered here.
Do all the germans in belgium have their own group chat
@@masterdeetectiv9520 Not necessary, they live in the same house.
I started school in 2007 directly learning the new spellings and I never realized how recent these changes were
But I do remember adults often saying stuff like "the new spelling" or "ah they changed the spelling", which always confused me
Also because I switched between the German and the Swiss school sytems 4 times, I had to learn the Scharfe s 'ß' twice because we don't use it in Switzerland
5:48 I misspell a lot of English words because of this like 'address' or 'development'
Another problem: English doesn't seem to have an Equivalent to 'Hochdeutsch'
Now that you say it. Yes, especally my teacher in first class. She was like 50 years old back then and talked a lot about the changes but i didn't know what she meant and didn't think much of it until now.
Also in der Schule hieß es immer das dieses Oxford Englisch, welches uns beigebracht wurde, das Äquivalent zum Hochdeutsch sei
"English doesn't seem to have an Equivalent to 'Hochdeutsch'"
"(Hannoveraner) Hochdeutsch" is usually said to mean the standard dialect of German (standard high german), but Hochdeutsch is also used to mean High German generally which almost all German dialects are. This is in contrast to Low German aka Plattdüütsch or Platt which is pretty much it's own language (active speakers mostly in the north). Standard High German also varies a bit between Austria Switzerland and Germany, but importantly it's standardised inside each state.
English also has this, some English speaking countries do have a standard dialect, General American, Oxford English... actually not sure whether there is an agreed upon version of Kenyan or Indian English, but they are definitely more cohesive within themselves than they are to Oxford English.
@@chalkchalkson5639 What? Most dialects aren't high german.
I started school in 1999 and somehow managed to go through a couple of iterations of the reform before they finally somewhat settled on something. I can still remember our teacher coming to us and telling us that now we have to spell this that way and suddenly a word like Schifffahrt with three F existed and of course no daß ever. Pretty sure that was already the case when I entered school but of course you don't really use that word in first grade.
I learned more about German spelling, than in my 16 years of being German.
Seriously, it took someone to explain the ß in English for me to finally get it, lmao.
@@Jakokokoroko yeah, my stupid ass really thought it was two s, despite the name literally being "sz".
Oh, well I guess they wouldn't be calling it ss even if "ß" was two s...
@@Jakokokoroko hab gelernt wie Buchstaben funktionieren, als ich mit meinem lrs Freund drüber diskutiert hab, warum man das so ausspricht
I always thought the reason for the existence of ß was quite obvious when thinking about it.
@@K2ELP Same, like how can you not know that as a native German speaker? lol I had to argue with my father all the time why "küssen" instead of "küßen" makes more sense (or "dass" instead of "daß"). I mean just look at the words "Fluss" and "Fuß" - they're spelled almost exactly the same but pronounced completely different (and obviously mean very different things), so why would I then spell Nussschale like "Nußschale"?
The most successful English spelling reform was Noah Webster's, in 1828. Not all of his recommendations were adopted, but many of them were -- at least in the USA; the rest of the English-speaking world is still slowly catching up after almost 200 years. And other simplified spellings have become unofficially accepted, even if they are still not considered to be proper English, like "thru" and "nite". "Donut" used to be in that category too, but due to the success of Dunkin' Donuts, most people now use the simplified spelling rather than "doughnut".
and i thought "thru" and "nite" were a modern texting vernacular thing
I like that, it's so much more intuitiv and easy. As a german I know of our spelling reforms but I never seen them make so much sense to me as I got from your video
I love that sometimes in German, you can tell the age of a person by how they spell. When I get a note from someone who writes "daß" instead of "dass", "Du" instead of "du", I can immediately tell that this note was written by an older person.
Du and du is the same. Du is writing at the beginning of a sencences.
@@Krenni98 Um... are you German? No, older people use "Du" similarly to "Sie" when writing to someone, capitalizing it out of respect, in the middle of a sentence. To younger generations it looks outdated.
@@Gaish i am from austria
@@Gaish I'm 20 and I use upper case "Du" for people at work because we have a company wide convention for addressing everyone informally, but it still feels awkward being that casual with someone older and more authoritative than me, so I try to do this at least.
AFAIK changing capitalisation of adresses in letters was never removed. It's just not taught anymore (and spell check can't check for it). Doesn't change that only older people do it, but makes people who don't do it wrong. But in the end there is no right or wrong German. People just forget that a private company doesn't have the power to declare it one or the other, and it's just the case that companies and government use the standart set by that private company.
Fun coincidence: when the proposed spelling reform for English “the” came up, it reminded me of how in Late Old Swedish and Early Modern Swedish the word “þe” (“they” and plural “the”; in modern language it’s “de”) was often spelled as “the” or “dhe”.
Removing the thorn letter is also the reason why people ended up writing "ye olde", because over time handwritten þ turned into something similar to y
And it's still pronounced the same way as modern english. "the old" and "þe olde" is pronounced the same.
I started going to school in 2009 and remember how all the books in german class also showed the old way of spelling a certain word.
I thought back then that it is a regular thing to change the languange (about every 10 years) and that it is just used to fuck with people lol
lol
Was that the 1996, the 2004, the 2006, the 2011 or the 2017 version of the neue Rechtschreibung?
2:12 this was one stupid mistake they made: "Stengel" does NOT come from "Stange", but from "stehen". so they actually made it more shit
This is the best take on English spelling reform I've ever seen. I absolutely hate the way some people complain about English spelling, especially non-English speakers who think our vowel system is whack because it's not like the continental one. Our vowel system has diverged from much of the rest of Europe, but it is perfectly systematic an learnable. It's not all memorization.
I teach Japanese people English, kids to adults. Many of them super struggle with reading and spelling, often because they aren't taught phonics so they don't understand the way you break up the visual information it understandable phonetic parts. I then strive to teach them the phonics, the rules, the "fushigi na E" (magic E), or doubling consonants before ~ed or ~ing for short vowels. I teach things like "c & k get lonely easily, so at the end of short words with no other consonant, so they usually like to be together: ck"
And this works. Some students of mine who do understand the phonics of reading can, just as native speakers, guess the reading of words they've never seen before with minimum mistakes. Our language is quite systematic after all, just a somewhat complex system. I think what makes it so frustrating is the long Latinate words. I often say how, unlike German, we keep more of the etymology within words. Angelo-Saxon and old French derived words fall under one fairly consistent system, while words from more modern French, from Latin or Greek roots, indeed from Italian or Spanish or German, get to keep their own orthographic style. Thus we get CHrist, CHeese, CHef, gnocCHi － these sorts of differences in how words are spelled & read.
I explain these things to my students. I explain the ways words have spellings that made sense before, but the pronunciation then changed. in "light," or "though," was once pronounced, I tell them, saying that middle English pronunciation out loud for them much to their amusement. This demystifies the spelling a lot, and when you allow yourself to learn these interesting histories embedded into the words, you learn to appreciate their strangeness a lot more.
And the fact that English can be unpredictable can often be a really manageable problem. I often teach my students about the three "ers." You got and and these are all the same (at least in my dialect of American English, and I think so in standard British too, even if you drop the /r/), so you have to memorize which one, but if you have to guess is the most common. That's annoying, but manageable, and you can distinguish homophones this way too: fir vs fur. I teach Japanese people, remember, and their writing system is WAY MORE intense about this kind of thing. Because they use kanji (Chinese characters), they often have homophones written with different characters: 橋 端 箸 are all read as "hashi" (though their is pitch accent involved too that differentiate them somewhat), even sligtly different nuances of what's basically the same word can be written differently: 止める、留める、停める are all "stop" but with different nuances; the middle one for "stop/stay at a hotel etc," the last one only for vehicles. This kind of complexity is not that weird, and even has a lot of usefulness and artistic potential in it.
But you're right that there are spelling features of English that could be improved, especially in those Latinate vocabulary. I've got a masters degree in teaching English, and I still can't figure out if it's single or double consonants sometimes. I also don't like how "soccer" is not "socker," but that one is less of a nuisance.
So that's where I want to praise what you have to say about spelling reform. You're so damn right that the best reforms are the ones that make the rules we already know and understand more consistent. English HAS had spelling reforms, just more so on my side of the pond. Every American knows about Webster and his reforms. Actually, he wasn't really "reforming" English, as it had no authoritative rules back then, only loose conventions. He chose the spelling variants he thought were simpler, the ones that followed the basic patterns more closely. Meanwhile in Britain, different conventions were becoming standardized. Webster thought the in "colour" was not necessary, while the British like the version with it, stuff like this. Other simplification he proposed didn't catch on: soop for soup, or aker for acre, but the point is they all followed the already established rules and styles that every literate person knew.
And there are plenty of words that have changed or are changing just naturally, the key feature of such vernacular spelling reforms being, that they make things more consistent with our internalized rules. Risk was once "risque." In the US at least, we very often write "donut" instead of "doughnut." We've got "lite" beer instead of "light." My grandmother lives in the town of Middleborough, MA but the post accepts people writing letters addressed to "Middleboro." In super causal contexts we have "tho" for "though," and "thru" for "through." These too, could be normal spelling at some future point.
English has a lot less centralized authority over spelling reforms than some other countries, so I don't see major spelling reform movements gaining traction anytime soon, but if they do, they'll be things that are putting stamps of approval on already widely used and understood vernacular spellings like "tho" and "thru," much like Webster did.
I for one, think we gotta get rid of "all right." It's "alright" people! It's linguistically one word!! You can tell by the intonation pattern!
Good comment but I disagree about "all right". Like, at the beginning of a sentence, it has stress on "all", but you can also stress "right" if you want to, like so: "Did you like it? It was all *right*, but it could've been better". So stress can fall on either morpheme, making it not really act like a single word
@@mmmmmmmmmmmmm There's a difference between "may be" and "maybe." There are times when you use "may be." (you may be right"), and times you use "maybe" (you're maybe right"). "May be" is two words, and "maybe" came from those two words, but it is one word now in how it is used. If you are not using "maybe," but rather the original "may be," then you can write it as such.
The same goes for "alright." The kind of "alright" I am talking about is ONE WORD. You can tell, because it is stressed as one word. If you aren't stressing and intoning it as one word, "alright," but rather saying "all right" then you are saying the original two words and can write it as such. I never say "all right" though, I say "alright" only and I will write it that way consequently.
It's the difference between "a white house" and "the White House." In the former, he have stress on white & on house, and a constant, punchy intonation (at the end of affirmative sentence). in the latter, "White House" is like one word, only "white" is stressed, the intonation is falling as a single flowing melody. "Alright" does the same, the first syllable is not stressed, and thus the vowel is reduced. It is clearly said as a single word-like unit, not two distinct lexemes, and the spelling of "alright" feels more natural as a result.
And you're example of of "it was all right, but..." sounds misguided to me. First of all "right" is ALWAYS stressed, it's the stressed syllable of "alright." The question is weather "all" is also stressed, which for me is never the case. Second, you seem to be mixing up stress and intonation. I just said "alright" has a falling intonation. This is for the end of a affirmative sentence. If you are asking a question, showing hesitancy in your answer, or showing that you're sentences is not yet finished, you may raise the intonation at the end. This does not change the fact that "alright" is stressed and intoned as a single lexical phrase.
@@rdreher7380 No, I'm talking about sentence-level stress to put extra emphasis on the word, which shows it's a different word. I'm not really sure which kind of "alright" you're talking about then. I don't think I have any kind that's stressed as one word.
@@mmmmmmmmmmmmm "sentence level stress" is, as far as I have ever read, not a thing. Emphasis is not the same thing as stress. Stress is rhythm, it's where the beats are in words and phrases. "All right" takes two full beats, two whole notes if you talk in music, or two feet if you talk in poetry. "Alright" is a syncopated eighth note pair, an iamb.
Emphasis is completely separate layer of rhetorical nuance. Intonation and timing can emphasize. Emphasis can override stress rules, good rhythmic use of stress can help emphasize, but emphasis is not the same as stress.
I am going. Normally: buh-ba BA-buh.
I AM going. buh BUH BA-buh.
Emphasizing "am" in such a sentence overrides the normal rule that "am" is an unstressed lexeme. But this doesn't change the nature of the word "am" and it's stress. This rhetorical device is breaking the stress rules, not defining them.
Alight, alright, alright, alright alright?
Alright, alright, alright, alright alright.
There, I just created an iambic pentameter. This meter cannot work if you treat "all right" as two separate words with full stressed beats.
What dialect of English to you speak? If you say "all right" with two beats, and no melody of intonation, then you can represent your weird dialect that way. I speak American English, upstate NY style, and for me this is one word and ought to be spelled such. I've never heard anyone say "all right." I know brits say "week end" instead of "weekend," but I'm pretty sure the say "a'right" very one-word like too.
@@mmmmmmmmmmmmm I tried saying "alright" with stress on the first syllable, and did realize it sounds rather British. "Ol' roight, let's get along then." I am imaging a caricature of a copper, like you might see in Monty Python, and when I say it like that it does start to sound like two beats. Maybe you speak some kind of British like that. I have a hunch though that that kind of "Ol roight," as an interjection would be different from the adjective "alright," as in "Oi, a' you o'roight?"
I started school the very year the spelling reform was implemented, so I've always learned the new way. I can imagine that it would have been a bit confusing if I'd started school like 2 years earlier and suddenly had to relearn stuff I'd _just_ learned
I remember adults going "argh, new spelling!" sometimes when I was a kid, but by now I haven't heard that in years.
I read old library books with the old spelling without any problem. Heck I read writing by Martin Luther with only mild problems
The far bigger problem with reading old german texts is the Fraktur-typeface and Sütterlin-handwriting.
When looking at spelling reforms, I think the transition of the Chinese writing system and it’s drastic reform should be mentioned
I speak german french and english and german spelling makes the most sense and is super consistent
They pronounce pretty much every letter, it makes speaking and writing the language less confusing, compared to french
obwohl oft zwischen einem offenen e und einem ä sehr wenig unterschied besteht und in der Rechschreibung werden beide buchstaben oft vertauscht. Außerdem ist die st und sp regel durch viele ausnahmen kaum zu erkennen und wörter wie deshalb und weshalb sollten mit zwei s geschrieben werden. Es gibt halt trotzdem einfach sehr viele Ausnahmen aber natürlich nicht so wie im englischen
@@jamjambo351 Unfortunately, many learners tend to really pronounce every letter, which makes them sound like Hitler when rolling Rs in words which in reality form an a-Schwa instead.
While it is still a controverse topic among scientists I tend to believe that language influences your thinking. German is very precise in comparison to English and French, especially the grammar. And so maybe this influences things like "German precision" or beaucracy which is renowned for almost 150 years by now.
@@leDespicable well rolling Rs don't exist in german, the R is more like in french. but pronouncing the Rs while uncommon is still perfectly correct. In general its just like once u know all the rules u can literally read any word even if u have never heard it (except for some foreign words)
We might be able to use and in the contexts of meaning /s/ and /z/, at least when we already use a or a in that spot. So while face->fase is perhaps a bit drastic as a change, advise->advize is perhaps workable. Though of course it would also depend a lot on whether most dialects use the groups consistently. American spelling has already done some of it already, so spreading those spellings where it doesn’t cause confusion is perhaps one option, though words like centring vs centering show that American spelling reform obviously can’t be just blindly applied across the board.
It seems reasonable to say that English really needs a bunch of spelling reforms, rather than one comprehensive spelling reform. Any spelling reform that could reasonably be implemented, will necessarily be limited and be unable to deal with most of the inconsistencies. Some if that spelling reform should also just be to teach the rules that currently exist that are widely unknown and thus only subconsciously self-taught. We do have greek, latin, and french loan words, all of which have more or less their own spelling system, none of which we teach, but make up nearly ¾ of all our words.
If we could standardize on perhaps 3 spelling systems (Germanic, Latinate, and Grecian), tidy up each of those systems, push words into one of those 3 systems unless they were being spelled similar to their loanword origin to show themselves as a nonnative word (so treating jalapeño as a Spanish foreign word rather than spelling it halapeno or whatever the Latinate rules would spell that word as to treat it like a Spanish loanword).
And to reiterate, it would probably have to be a multigenerational thing, and sold to be a multigenerational thing. One generation would make minor reforms to standardize one small part of English spelling. 30 years later, a different group of people would look at the system they have now grown up with and find the simple reforms that can be implemented. For example, perhaps if we used s and z to indicate /s/ and /z/ consistently, then spelling face as fase would be easily understood to be pronounced the same. Then another 30 years later the next group of English speakers could decide whether tack could be spelled as tac, tacked as tacced and take as tace as the c would be easily understood as being the same of k when c hasn’t been used to make an s or z sound for over 30 years. Maybe that’s still too short of a time period so they instead go with tack as tak and tacked as takked, take staying the same while case becomes kase, leaving ch the sole use for the letter c.
In the latter ch can become c in another 30 years, the letter exclusively referring to that phoneme. In the former, c and ch are each their own phonemes and stay that way. Or maybe there’s good reasons to not do any of those reforms (probably the case), but the point remains that each reform successfully implemented should in theory make further reforms easier and while reading spelling from a hundred years ago may become difficult, there would never be a point where everyone couldn’t read because the spelling was unrecognizable. Perhaps for some of the older individuals who would have gone through 2 or 3 reforms in their lifetime this rate of change would be too much, but given how digital our life is currently, tools could be made to automatically translate spelling from one to the other, for those people who were unable to keep up with the series of reforms.
I think the time between reforms should be longer so that most people would go thru only 1 reform. A change every 30 years is too fast paced unless the reforms only touch a handful of words. Anywhere between 60 and 100 years would be better. I like your idea of grouping words by origin, you could use that to explain the letter *i* in machine and police (it would be easier if it was spelled mashin, tho), but if you adopt the Spanish/French rule for C (soft before E, I, Y) you shouldn't make other groups go in the exact opposite direction. Just add a K when hard C is necessary (socker, syncking) or an E when it's soft (i.e. don't drop the E from noticeable) and be done with it. It's OK if a 300-year manuscript is hard to read, but you should be able to read something from the previous century easily. If C changes its value every 30 years you wouldn't be able to read anything your mom writes to you (because she would probably mix old and new spellings all the time),
@@marcusaureliusf Also make sure the setup for each reform would be at least 20 years, to make sure by the time it starts being applied all possible changes are accepted. We don't want to repeat the german spelling reform that for 2 decades kept changing things, leaving an entire generation that sits halfway between because some things they learned are already obsolete when they finish school.
You make it sound easy. Back in the day, almost everyone in Germany was up in arms about the spelling reform. People complained about how the state trying to tell them how to use language was a blatant violation of their privacy (sound familiar?). One major newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, even openly refused to use the new spelling once it had become mandatory for official and school use. People used the rarest examples of words to criticize the changes, like "Delphin" to "Delfin" or downright fabricated fake examples like "Füsik" instead of "Physik". Nobody, however, talked about the "daß/dass", which is easily the most frequently used single word affected by the reform.
And as a language teacher in Germany, I can reliably testify that no student ever gets the spelling of "dass" wrong (as long as they _mean_ the conjunction and do not confuse it with the article that just spells "das") - well, duh; because it follows a clear _rule._ And still nobody talks about how the reform made learning spelling _easier._ It seems that everybody who whined about it loudly back in the day does not want to draw attention to their failure in judgement, really... Which makes it so much poorer that Switzerland outright refused to join the reform and still writes words with a _long_ vowel followed by a sharp /s/ with "ss", not with "ß".
Needless to say, the Franfurter Allgemeine has long since quietly adopted the reformed spelling. I suppose they, too, do not want to be reminded of how they initially swore to drop dead before they used this immature newfangled fashion.
"Schifffahrt" I'll leave this masterpiece of our Rechtschreibreform here for your enjoyment 😉
@@luschmiedt1071 Meinst du nicht eher Flussschifffahrt statt Flußschiffahrt?
@@ChipitaDraws ist natürlich auch ein schönes Beispiel, bis 96 wurde Schifffahrt aber nur mit zwei f geschrieben, daher das beispiel
@@luschmiedt1071 Achso. Jedenfalls kommen Dreifachkonsonanten nun häufiger vor.
German teachers have long given up on actually teaching (or discipline) and now are full time indoctrinators for progressivism. This post is par for the course and if you have a kid in german school like, I do you, expect that they'll receive one such one sided pro government sermon per day, of course always littered with derision for the other side.
However, we are not your class so let me emphatically say that the state doesn't own the language no matter what a government teat sucking left/green teacher says.
The only noteworthy consequence is of the reform was that nobody cares about spelling anymore except the people who learned and still write the old system. Even newspapers are littered with errors nowadays.
On the topic of spelling reforms, I highly encourage you to make a video about the disaster that has been the Portuguese spelling reform of 1990: meant to bring all Portuguese-speaking nations together under a unified spelling, it has been ratified at an extremely slow pace, there was a tremendous backlash in Portugal upon its implementation and it managed to anger native speakers from all Portuguese speaking countries (not just Portugal) due to the introduction of new and inconsistent rules that violate the 1st, 3rd and 4th principles you've highlighted at the end of your video.
Apart from that, I'd just like to point you I've stumbled upon your channel very recently and I believe you're massively underrated. Keep up the good work, you've gained a new subscriber.
I would love to learn more! Could you provide some examples of this “disaster”?
(The only one I’m already aware of is the abolition of the letter ü)
If you ask me, an easy way to solve english's bad spelling at least in part is to add diacritics to specify vowel lengths where they aren't consistent with what you would expect.
no thank you
@@victorstroganov8135 It'd make learning english one hell of a lot easier tho. Sure, it's extra letters, but at least you fucking know how the shit is pronounced when you read it lol
Accent and breathing marks were, by far, the worst part of learning Ancient Greek; I see no reason why any sane person would introduce extraneous markings into a language that was blessed not to have them in the first place.
@@costakeith9048 Accents akin to the ones in French wouldn't be that difficult to learn
@@costakeith9048 Exactly! When I was dabling in Ancient Greek i mostly ignored them, except for the first vowel 'h' sounds
0:36
As someone who's suggested getting rid of the letter "c", my solution to the "ch" problem is to introduce a new letter to represent it since the "ch" sound is a distinct phoneme rather than just a "c" and "h" sound put together. The Cyrilic alphabet uses "Ч" for this sound which I quite like since it leaves less room for ambiguity.
but......................
why?
@@kklein Like I said, reduced ambiguity. C doesn't represent any unique sound and "ch" is extremely inconsistent in English. It's sounds like "ch" in words like "catch" but can also sound like "k" or "sh" like in "ache" and "cache" respectively. "C" isn't exactly useful and I think a dedicated symbol to represent the "ch" sound would make more sense.
@@connorwright7040 If you really want to do that, then just use "c" as the symbol for /tʃ/.
This is still a bad idea though, because you'll have to redo A LOT of stuff in the orthography.
Intervocalic voicing is a big problem - if you replaced the "c" in replace with an "s" you'd get "replase", which reads /ɹɪˈpleɪz/, with a voiced fricative at the end (like in words like "phase" and "raise"). If you want to get rid of "c" in this capacity and only use it for /tʃ/ going forward, you'd need to make the z/s distinction consistent, which means your reform just got bigger, and you have to start redoing a lot more things than just this one letter...
English orthography is a very bad system, but it's also a very interwoven system, with everything affecting everything else. I'm not saying you couldn't make a better writing system for English - you absolutely could! And many people have, and I admire their work. But just getting rid of "c" and calling it a day doesn't work... there's always more words to consider.
Also those problems with the "ch" digraph you just mentioned... couldn't you solve them with A LOT less effort by just... changing those individual words? It's far less effort than getting rid of an entire letter from the alphabet, right?
ache --> ake
cache --> casche/cash [if you don't care about preserving written distinctions between homophones]/cashe
@@kklein I guess that really would basically require a complete overhaul of English orthography. Making reformed spelling unrecognizable to people used to the old spelling would be counterproductive. Point taken.
@@connorwright7040 Yes, that's why it's always more pratical to gradually incorporate variants, improve --> improov(e), sister --> syster (analogy with , ,, & ...), in the end of words usually is \i\ (EE) like , , , and , so may look y\ði\, the strong pronounciation of , so instead why not use , so perhaps it would be practical instead of , , and instead of , and
Reforming english spelling probably wouldn't really work. English is just too decentralised and spread. While German is only used in comparativley few countries as an official language, not even all of them have adapted the spelling reform and there are still differences even in those that did. English meanwhile is an official language in 67 countries, many of which already have different ways of spelling, most prominently British and American English. So I reckon even if a spelling reform were to take place, it probably wouldn't be adopted by a majority of English speaking countries.
I think an agreement between the USA, UK and Canada would have massive ripple effects as all Western media in native English would quickly adjust and the EU as an incredibly influential block of non-native English learners would follow suit as communication with Anglophones is among the foremost reasons for teaching English.
At that point the new spelling would dominate the internet, all dictionaries would reflect it and everyone saying otherwise would be the odd one out.
I don't think Australia would try to go it alone.
India may be a more difficult sell, but it does not ultimately hold much sway over English in terms of global convention.
@@MrHodoAstartes Personally I do not think that the US, Canada and the UK could actually come to an understanding, as especially Canada builds the core of its identity on being different to America and would therefore not accept something like a universal spelling reform. If the suggesttion came from the UK, there is no way the US would follow and if the US were to suggest ist, I doubt the UK would agree, the pride on either side is just too great. Though I guess that the US would have the best chances given its influence on global and anglophone academia. One of the other problems would be centralising written English in Africa which, given its already very fractured and tribal nature, has very loose regulating on language. There are many ways to spell the same African languages and some that are almost impossible to spell with most writing systems. English is therefore pretty much impossible to standardise in Africa. Even if such a spelling reform were to take place. And as I had already mentioned, the German reform wasn't actually as effective as he made it out to be. Switzerland for example still has a lot of irregularities in its written language, so just imagine how that would work on a much larger scale with considerable backlash of the more conservative parts of academia. Even in Germany there are still discussions in wether or not the reforms actually made sense.
...Germany is an official language in Germany, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Austria, Namibia, parts of Italy, Denmark, Belgium and France. It is also a very common language for Eastern and Southern Europeans to speak. Hence "few countries" is extremely relative. In addition, there already is a distinction between American and British English, there is no need to worry about it now if there are already so many differences between those two (if anything, one could use a reform to streamline those a little bit).
@@swanpride all of those countries other than Namibia are in Europe. That's the difference.
The Brit’s and the Americans can standardize their English all they want, but Indians will still come along and make everyone speak their own brand of English.
In my 33 years as a German, I have never thought about the influence of a "ß" on vowels in my pronunciation. So I have unconsciously always applied the rule correctly, but never consciously noticed it. Exciting how language works and is learned. Thank you for opening my eyes for this little detail. :-)
I've seen 'cafeteria' (eat-room) written in German... Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the beauty of 'Esssaal'
They should just adopt the Dutch way and write eetzaal and pretend tz combination is ss-s in German.
And what would be so wrong with something simple as "Fresshalle"
My native language of Japanese had a large spelling reform relatively recently. Wi and we were removed as well as removing some incoherent syllables. I have some family in the mountains in Hokkaido and the dialect from pre-1945 and the difference is obvious. Especially when ‘私’ watashi (I) was made and they removed ‘わた歌詞’ watakashi (I)
Interesting. Personally, I've always had a rather negative opinion on the German spelling reforms. I went to school during the first one, so I had to re-learn some things that were the norm during my first years learning to write and read.
And after I graduated, some of the "new" rules were revoked.
The result is a generation, that writes as it pleases.
I will admit that there were some useful changes though.
One of the *scarce* useful changes was _Alptraum → Albtraum,_ it’s caused by a spook, not by mountains. That’s pretty much it. _Quentchen_ *doesn’t* derive from _Quantum_ but from _Quent,_ and _Tolpatsch_ from Hungarian _Talpas,_ *not* from _tollen_ und _patschen_
The reform -perverted- topsy-turvied the first and most important rule of orthography: *Writing must serve the reader, not the writer.*
You have a generation of people living today that do much more radical things as they please.
We have 69 genders.
Men can be women and participate as women in sports
There is no genders whatsoever and everyone is the same which throws the first two things out the window....
We should be glad that our Rechtschreibreform was just a minor obstacle for us.
I remember I once had an admission exam for a school and I had to chose "new" or "old spelling".
I didnt know there was a new NEW spelling reform. So I chose "NEW" and well I almost failed because I actually used the OLD one.
So that was strange haha.
Instead of calling it "spelling reform 19xx" with the year. They chose nonsense like "new" and "old".
Funnily enough, writing as one pleased was the norm until fairly recently for pretty much all languages. Yes, there were guidelines and conventions, but not hard rules like we have today, that's a thing of the past 200 years mostly.
@@ShiftySqvirrel Because of 200 years of decreasing illiteracy and the increasing number of potential recipients? Still, anyone can write as he pleases as long he doesn’t want to be read and/or understood.
Once more: Writing is for the reader. Nobody cares about the orthography nor the scrawl of your shopping list - unless you hand it to someoneone to shop for you. Intelligible writing might help prevent some unpleasant surprises.
@@gertrudedierude7224 I meant it as a fun fact, not a criticism, my apologies.
Another spelling reform that worked well is the one for Afrikaans. It was originally intended for Dutch too and was actually meant for Dutch and not Afrikaans but for some reason it never materialised and only Afrikaans got the reform. The main changes were to remove diphthongs that sounded the same, mainly compressing au, ou, ouw and auw into just ou and changing the t in tie and tion to an s because that is how you pronounce it. Another change is changing the ij to a y. ij is considered one letter and is even called Greek I or y so it makes sense why it was changed. These are only a few of the changes but most were pretty minor, but made Afrikaans a language that is very easy to spell and it is spelled 100% phonetically. I was quite surprised at how weird some of the Dutch spelling are when I learnt it and its significantly harder to remember compared to Afrikaans. However its not worse to read though, just harder to write.
There was a suggestion I'd read somewhere changing the in some words to , similarly to German. This would show the difference in sound between "näture" and "natural" for instance
4:25 it’s somewhat misleading to show Switzerland as having adopted the new spellings, because a) Switzerland never* used the ß to begin with, so “dass”, “Fass”, etc were always written with double s here, and b) Switzerland rejected many of the new spellings outright, often because the new spellings reflected strictly the pronunciations in Germany (like Majonäse) which, particularly in the case of the (many) words of French origin, does not reflect the pronunciation in Switzerland (where words of French and Italian origin tend to be pronounced fairly faithfully to their original languages).
Switzerland didn’t really appreciate being significantly ignored during the reforms, and in the end, the new spellings that were adopted largely failed to catch on, and even newspapers have reverted many things back to the old spellings (like Stengel).
I was in the last entering high school (gymnasium) class that officially used the old spellings. But looking at the writing of people much younger than me, it’s clear the new orthography did not stick.
Disclaimer before anyone attempts to “school” me or otherwise make inapplicable comments: I’m not talking about Swiss German (Schwiizerdütsch), the Swiss dialects of the Allemanic language. I’m talking about Swiss Standard German, the Swiss dialect of standard German (Schweizer-Hochdeutsch, as I like to call it).
*not technically true, but it was used inconsistently and abandoned entirely so long ago as to be irrelevant. We can at least say that in the entire time since German abandoned Fraktur type, Switzerland has never used the Eszett.
@Josodo Ist egal, da es sich um etwas anderes handelt: in der Schweiz bezeichnet man Standarddeutsch (das was wir jetzt schreiben) als „Hochdeutsch“ oder „Schriftdeutsch“, um es vom Schwiizerdütsch abzugrenzen.
Das hat mit der sprachwissenschaftlichen Aufteilung von Hoch- und Niederdeutschen Dialekten und Sprachen nichts zu tun.
@Josodo Siehe de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_Hochdeutsch
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standarddeutsch
und
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochdeutsch
@Josodo Ach so, alles klar! :)
@Josodo Lustiger Fakt: Schweizerdeutsch ist ja eine Sammlung verwandter Dialekte der Alemannischen Sprache, und zwar hauptsächlich „Hochalemannisch“, aber teilweise „Höchstalemannisch“! 😆
Ich stimme dir zu, wobei man sagen muss: „Majonäse“ ist im ganzen deutschen Sprachraum gescheitert (nicht nur in der Schweiz) und gilt seit 2017 nicht mehr als korrekte Schreibweise. Bessere Beispiele wären vermutlich Sauce/Soße, Menu/Menü oder Portemonnaie/Portmonee.
Spanish may have a lot of strange stuff, but what I love about it is that you can 100% know how to pronounce a word just by reading it. This is helped by the fact that Spanish just has 5 sounds for its vowels, unlike English, where A for example can be pronounced in many different ways
"¡Qué sabio es este hombre!"
I think that Spanish benefits from being a direct descendant of Latin (and a pretty faithful one at that), which the alphabet was originally made for. For most other languages though, it has to be adapted in order to fit, which leads to a lot of letter pairs like th or ue, diacritics, rules that alter pronunciation like the German double vowels, or nightmare orthographies like in English.
It’s not quite 100% like you say it is. I agree with you that it’s still very consistent overall, especially compared to other languages - I’d give it a solid 9/10 - but there are certainly some exceptions that ruin it.
The main one is the pronunciation of the letter X - in most words it’s /ks/ (e.g. próximo, tórax), but in some weird cases it’s pronounced like the Spanish J (e.g. México). I understand that these are mostly regional words preserved for etymological reasons, but still, they ruin the otherwise consistent rule.
The other big exception is how loanwords are handled. While I have no problem with Spanish spelling loanwards the same way as in the original language (e.g. jazz), or adapting them to fit their own rules (e.g. béisbol), what I don’t understand is the “half-adapted” words. For example: hándbol. Shouldn’t that be either “jándbol” or just “handball”? If you change the A into the O, why don’t you also change the H? Because the current spelling makes it look like it should be pronounced like /ˈand.bol/.
There's already basically been a spelling reform in English when the spelling was first standardised. It's just not called a “reform”, because there was no unified spelling to reform at the time. I find it pretty fascinating.
Old books are funny to read, because often you need to read it out loud for it to make sense. An old cookbook called for flower, and it took me a bit to realise they meant flour. Sometimes it’s not another words, it's something like “jinerall”, and you need to sound it out. (That's “general”, by the way, written like that in a poem quoted by The Harvard Magazine in 1861 and Davy Crockett's Almanacs before that.)
As long as you sound it out and know that þ is pronounced as th, you're good. I think there’s another letter that sometimes trips me up but I can’t remember it right now. (Edit: it was the ſ, it looks more like a worn out letter f in old text, but it’s pronounced like a long s.)
My point is, there's no reason a spelling reform wouldn’t be possible in English, especially how you outlined it here. The four rules make a lot of sense.
Here’s the 1861 war poem, “Vurse to the Amerikan Eegel”
“O burd well nown
& ginerally, respeckted - all hale !
Thow art prepaired, I kalkilate,
Tu stick claws constitushunal
Intu the hide uv treeson (That's a GOAK!
But tu prosede.) How mad yu bee
Fur trators tu pull down the flagg
Wich yu pertickulerly perteckt & uv wich
Yu air the cheef perpriatur! How lowd
Yu screem & how yu holler 4th
The cri uv war!! It seems az tho'
Yu 'd kill ten men & a small boy
By only lookin' at them mutch. Sa,
Prowd, inndignunt bein' (so too speek),
Wunt yu wipe out Ccesshun & sich like
Humbugg frum the starrs & stripes
Uv this gellorious land uv Unkel Samm's ?
Wunt yu attend tu matters & dispose
Uv Davis, Boreegard, & Mistur Wise uv Virginny,
& the furm in jinerall, so as tu
Bennifit the health of mankind ?
Ice again, & tu konclude, all hale!
Sore up, thow Bird uv Fredum!!”
@Altusestmieiovis that is actually the only word I wasn’t able to fully figure out! My best suggestion is *cession* , from the word concede (basically means surrender), and the writer wants to keep fighting for their land? It’s such an unfamiliar word to me that I'm not sure if it fits in this context or not.
@@JasminMiettunen I understood most of this, but what the hell's a goak?
@@einootspork Feels like the sound some animal would make.
"And getting rid of silent letters!" These vowels have a problem, and Silent E's to blame! Instead of "ah", "eh", "ih", "aw", "uh", he makes them say their name. He's changed their sounds to A and E and I and O and U. With powers like that, just think about the damage he can do. Silent E! He changes cub into a cube! Silent E. He changes tub into a tube! He changes twin to twine, he changes can into a cane. And this brave man must stop him, before he strikes again!
Here in Switzerland, the ß was surprisingly not adapted.
Also, at 4:22 you did a great job on excluding the welsh (french speaking) part of Switzerland but forgot to exclude the Tessin (Speaking Italian). Great Video though!
Well… Originally the ß was used here in Switzerland as well, but it was removed in the 1930s and 1940s (first in Zurich and then the other cantons followed). So it was adapted in Switzerland, but got removed years ago.
There are several stories to why Switzerland removed it and I don’t know which one is correct. Sometimes it‘s said, that it got removed, cause we wanted a typewriter keyboard that could be used to write all languages of Switzerland, but theres wasn‘t enough space and therefore it was decided to get rid of it. Sometimes it‘s said, that it was removed to differentiate our German more from the German in Nazi Germany.
When you mentioned "developing", it really made me laugh. I assure you, every german child makes this mistake at the beginning spelling "developing" like "eloping" because for us it's the obvious pronounciation. One of the most different things in our language lessons in school is to learn and accept that many other languages don't take it serious with rules and consistency in the way the german language does :D
Well, we also have our inconsistencies, but its not such a chaos like the english spelling.
But spelling "developing" like "eloping" is not a mistake at all...
THIS. honestly this video showed me that apparently im pronouncing a lot of english words wrong? i only know them from reading and ofc i would pronounce them according to what ive learned about the english alphabeth and similar looking words which pronouncation i know. im glad i stopped giving fucks a few years ago, pronouncing correctly or spelling correctly is no longer that important as it is to communicate what i wanna say
I wonder how many other languages don't take it serious with rules and consistency
Spanish is argubly even more consistent.
Hey I think you should look at the Serbian Spelling System and Reform, it's quite simple and somewhat unique! Maybe you could even do a video on it...
I was is school when the Rechtschreibreform happened. I immediately jumped from a 4- (D-) in spelling to a 1- (A-).
I remember there were lots of heated discussions among the grown-ups about the changes. Some more conservative newspapers even refused to print the new way. But I liked it from day one. There is no good reason why our spellings must ne inconsistent.
I was also in school. My grades dropped like a stone in german class, for the two years spelling still mattered. And after I finished school I never again was in a situation where I couldn't use spell check when spelling was important, and so now I just write how I want to. I think it's quite close to the old way, except that I sometimes remember to change any and all ß into ss and that I have to count out how many vowels I have to chain.
American English had a small spelling reform in the 19th century when we dropped the 'u' from words like "color", "honor", "flavor", etc.
I was in school when these changes happened. It made things so much clearer. Lesser exceptions in a language are always good. I liked it a lot. Like your videos :)
I am also half French, so I always have to deal with stuff like: professional (EN) - professionell (DE) - professionnel (FR)
Plus one for simplifying double letters.
Many older Germans would still disagree, but that's the nature of a reform. It's also worth mentioning, that german language rules still aren't as logical as they could - and probably should - be. But what's perfect in this world? It's actually fair to say that the German spelling reform was a good idea in its second iteration.
you cant disagree on facts.
Have you been around the last decade? How can anyone unironically say that sentence after Trump and everything that happened? You can become the fucking American President by disagreeing on facts. So why would someone who doesn't like change care for much less obvious facts, then?
@@Ginkoman2 True. And that means that there are at least 6 ways of spelling german in use in Germany alone which were all considered correct at some point in the last 30 years.
As a German, the spelling reform did some good things but also ended up making certain words look straight up ugly, for example the word ‘wallet’
Which is spelled Portemonnaie but the reform allows it to be spelled like Portmonee as well which is hurting my eye
Frisör
As a dislexic im very very thankful for that. I simply can't remember that kind of spelling.
@@karlfranzemperorofmandefil5547 well, that's French for ya!
@@phython124 Büro
@@phython124 Frisör ist immerhin phonetisch korrekt.
Das Büro schreibst du ja auch nicht als Bureau (wird als Büro ausgesprochen).
May I suggest writing the soft "g" as "j"?
And may I also suggest changing the word ending "-ize" to "-ise"? Ex.: "sanitize" ---> "sanitise"
That's how sanitise is spelt
How did you not realise this
@@Ulysses_S_Grant_18 remember that spellings may vary depending on where you live. In the US and Canada it's sanitize
Why would you do that? Does the make more sense to represent the /z/ sound?? only ever makes two or three sounds in English, the majority of the time it makes a /z/ sound and in some french or foreign words it makes a /ʒ/ (like in seizure) or a /tz/ sound (like in pizza). Meanwhile s can make sounds like:
/s/: "see"
/z/: "phase"
/ʃ/: "Russia"
/ʒ/: "vision"
@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx But also in German the s is very diverse and even depends on the area. E.g. In Germany you often encounter /s/, /z/, /ʃ/ and even /ʒ/ depending on position and if the word is a loanword from French or another language. The same is true for the z, which is pronouced like "ts" in all native words, but in various different ways in loanwords. In Austria and Switzerland you might only encounter /s/ and /ʃ/ and no voiced variants, with the latter sound being more common than in Germany, like in the consonant clusters "rs" and "sp".
I don't think English spelling can be reformed to fit every local variation and loanword.
Funny you bring up that particular spelling reform (-ize to ise), the British attempted that reform in the late 19th century, the US rejected it as did the Oxford University Press (the US disliked that the British were trying to tell us how to spell and Oxford disliked the fact that it obscured etymology, -ize words come from Greek, -ise words come from romance languages, mostly French). So now both spellings are technically correct English spellings, which is typically how our spelling reforms go: removing the 'u' from words like 'colour' and the reversing the '-re' to '-er' in words like 'centre', likewise created two spelling conventions you now have to learn. These are all proper English now, thanks to spelling reforms:
'I realize this is the wrong color.' (American English)
'I realize this is the wrong colour.' (Oxford English)
'I realise this is the wrong colour.' (Standard British English)
the more i learn about other languages the more thankful i am that spelling is so straightforward in spanish. compared to what english and german and many other languages have, spanish almost spells itself. the most "confusing" aspects about spelling in spanish are just homophones, allophones (spelling z with s, or y with ll), and tildes (but if you know the rules for tildes you can tell 90% of the time if a word has tilde or not from the pronunciation alone).
I'm german, and was in school as the 2006 reform happened... never really understood the rules between the changes, and even the 1996 changes where confusing as many older people still use some style from before then.
I don't need to write in german to often, so everytime I got to write a word where I remember there being differences in spelling, it's time to ask google and hope I make sense of the answer.
Honestly, this video did a better job at explaining it then the many years I had in school... and the video isn't even in german!
Thanks mate for this great explanation.
I was in school when the 1996 reform happened, them continually messing with the reform only caused uncertainty about what is considered correct.
My one point to the proposed reform for English is just that the pronunciation is different because of stress in the word, and the problem becomes that especially in longer words, doubling consonants makes the word a whole lot longer. And ultimately, even thought we call them 'long vowels' the distinction isn't length anymore, it's actually just stress, which the word generally informs. So 'developing' and 'eloping' are different like how 'hospital' and 'hospitality' are, which is to say, with more or less syllables, the stress appears shifted away from the 'root' position. And I don't want some weird 'hospittall' vs 'hospittalitty' distinction, and would actually rather have an accent mark on non-normal stress patterns, since the English vowel system is so messed up, and where German spelling can pretty precisely reflect vowel pronunciation in that subtle way, we just can't. We need umlauts before double letters.
the other option is indeed to pretty much get rid of long consonants and replace them with a long vowel system
Devēloping/Devéloping && eloping
I am german and intuitively I would spell the words as hospital and hospitallity. Short vowels marked in this way are rare so word length doesnt increase often. Long and short vowels has always just been about stress.
Not sure if it counts, but a major "spelling" change was when Chinese was simplified in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Very different type of writing, but much more massive changes I think.
It actually started in the 30s, and it remains very controversial among the Chinese-speaking world
@@lamlam-bw7ev Especially since only part of it adopted it.
What you also have to consider is that German did not change Latin words, but rather pronounces them correctly, which is why Germans can read all Latin in English without too much difficulty since it is basically written the same just that we made the C (which in Latin was (in the Italian/ or nowadays Romansch (Schweitzer Dialect des Lateins)) mostly pronounced as k) to K where it was pronounced as such, which fucks with my head every time I translate any thought from English to German or vise versa. Updating Latin spelling is not a good idea if you want other to use you’re (British) version of English. What many people don’t know is that the spelling change also came with a -maybe unintentional but probably intentional- change in what pronunciation was considered „correct“ changing or killing most dialect and removing large chunks of Germanic heritage vocabulary in favor of the „proper“ word which often was Latin, Franco or Anglo in origin.
There were also 3 Reforms which for a long time lead to confusion since not every teacher learned or/and taught them.
English spelling also is easier if you know the basic spelling rules of Latin and more importantly French.
Nobody cares but thought I’d give my 2Cents on the matter since I have some experience with Germanistik.
German changed the written form of loanwords so that a german can pronounce them following german spelling.
English kept the foreign form of loanwords and just tries to wing it.
4:33 The kerning of letters in the title pops back and forth here. It’s subtle.
It also happens in the following slides. What could have caused this?
Making a interesting video on spelling reforms is hard. I respect the fact that you did it.
2:44 In „Ofen“, the „o“ should not only be long, but closed like in „yawn“ (Britisch Received Pronounciation).
Your „Ofen“ wasn‘t understandable, because your „o“ wasn‘t closed enough and it has to be one straight sound.
I like your video, so I gave it a thumb up. And your idea to implement more double consonants in English is not bad. ;)
Right, all of his long o's were just longer short o's, which is not how they are pronounced.
Accurate
With English being a heavily mixed language, I feel as though any spelling reform would have to take into account the root language of each word.
Are there any other languages that are as heavily influenced by other languages such as English? Or close seconds?
I mean the thing with english is that the problems are so deep that any regularizing changes would have a good case for extending for the rest of its combinations. Like, Thorn and Ed’s wouldn’t created massive problems. And “completely redoing the vowel system” would only be true *on paper*. And languages that are highly phonemic still represent their irregularities nakedly and people just have to deal with them, just as they do in speech.
And we deal with homophones all the time. In orthographic reform, one has to accept those sorts of things.
And i think with English, as has been seen with the internet and typesetting, simplification is the way to go. The Thorn/Edh examples you brought up have already moved on informally for some of them: Tho, *thot, thru, tuff. The way vowels and diphthongs are represented are also a core issue. Additionally-and i know this is a polarizing opinion-at some point the importing in of foreign words unadaptedly is unwieldy and impractical, especially given on how much of the false assumed commonality it relies on (which starkly breaks down quickly with languages that have very large consonant inventories, such as Taa).
Id love to hear more of your ideas for english spelling reform I enjoyed and agreeded with your proposed double cosonant
This idea definetely deserves more attention! Let's not be afraid of changes!
I feel like a spelling reform for German was possible because of proximity and scale, and thats the same reason why it isn’t possible for English.
English already has two major camps, US and UK English, I think the US could do this just fine since they will accept change when their version of English was built around making more sense, but the UK is more stubborn and so are the Commonwealth countries, all you do is risk creating a third spelling rift in English resulting in more confusion.
As an Aussie who has to deal with both versions for different sites who don’t offer my English, I would be very confused if I had to now spell the UK English because now Australian English becomes a way more distinct form of English just by not being asked or at least not agreeing on said changes.
This is what I would call the mass bastardisation of English as now no one knows how to spell words if not British or American, the Canadians may cave to the Yanks for christ sake, while Australia and New Zealand both ask South Africa and India wtf we are meant to do, chaos I tell you chaos.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
We've got a spelling reform in french that was very nice, imo. (got rid of the useless "i" in "oignon", of the accent in "û" wherever it doesn't bring anything, etc.)
What scares me is that there was so much defensive reactions to this reform, like it's an attack to the purity/integrity/history of the language, we will all write like idiots, and so on.
@@marcusaureliusf the reform happened more than 30 years ago and most people including french teachers don't fully know what was part of the reform and as far as i know both spellings are kept in use (old and reformed) so yeah little is being achieved in French and it's a historical problem the language was made to be hard to write etc.
This vid is of good quality for sure (i mean, even if we are talking about the editing only), so keep up the good work!
I was looking for a random video to watch during a pause and I was surprised by this by the end of the video! I have a B1 level in german..what about some video talkinga about the transition between gothic stilish fonts and the "regular ones" we have today? great video, thanks!
Weirdly all these rules really are existent in my head and consistent and you just made me aware of them hahah being fluent in a language really is weird, you never think about anything. But I also apply it to English subconsciously apparently because I ALWAYS misspell developed
Your suggested reform is good imo. Another proposed idea where /ɛ/ monothong is allways written which I also think could grow threw. I wish that "ough" would change to better. It's allready done by some.
Great video, but to me "devellopping" looks like it'd be pronounced like "deh vel lop ing", "lop" like "lop their head off" which sounds like "law-p".
I think the o in develop is actually underlyingly long but unstressed to a schwa
That's another dialectal difference (the "cot-caught merger"). In dialects that haven't undergone this merger (like Received Pronunciation British English), "lop" and "lawp" are pronounced differently.
Portuguese, both the european and Brazilian varieties, has gone through many spelling reforms throughout the 20th century, to the extent a 19th century text feels extremely weird to read (you can still read it, it's just unconfortable). the "Grammatica Philosophica da Lingua Portugueza(1822)" would now be spelt "Gramática Filosófica da Língua Portuguesa", "finaes" became "finais", "Brazil" became "Brasil", "directo" became "direto" and many other changes.
The most recent reform was in 1990, which wanted to bring closer the two varieties, and ironically made spelling less consistent in both of them, because each side had to make acommodations for the other. Brazilians had to sacrifice the stress mark in "idéia (ideia)" that meant it was pronounced different from "sereia" and the portuguese lost the mute consonat in "director (diretor)" that meant the "e" was not reduced.
Spanish also made some recent reforms in the 2010's about the stress mark because some words don't follow the stress mark rules (e.g., "sólo" vs. "solo"). These words are very common so they were just accepted as exceptions. So basically they just said that writing the words without the stress mark would not be considered incorrect. Pretty uneventful.
I must say, I really hate the replacing of 'ph' with 'f', it obscures the Greek origins of the word and, worse than that, just looks ugly. But maybe it's not as horrific to native Portuguese speakers as it would be to someone like me who only knows English, Greek, and Latin.
@@costakeith9048 The fact that Latin generally dropped Ph for F already in most cases makes it easy for Latin languages. Germanic and other languages have the issue of direct borrowing from Greek vs transmission through Latin - and for historical-cultural reasons, I'd use the Latin style, on top of the fact that Ph is almost solely used in Greek-origin words and is otherwise completely foreign to Germanic languages.
The 1990 reform actually happened in 2009... Yes, it took a long time to be approved.
I don't get the last one thought. Why not let Brazilian and Portuguese spellings be different? British and American spellings are different.
instead of getting rid of C, we should just replace S and K both with C for even more inconsistency!
What do you do about ch and sh? /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ they don't make the s or k sound: like in ce, /s/ and ca /k/ and then about kind (which if you replace k with c (cind, it'd be /sɪnd/(if I transcribed that correctly) (which is sinned, so it'd be a homophone)
(in english specifically) I think that english orthography would need a whole makeover, rather than ridding letters from the language. Diacritics could work
@@luckneh5330 eh, probably represent /ʃ/ with "ch" and /tʃ/ with "tch"
I'm aware that would make words like "hatch" spell as "hattch" which looks really weird, but this whole idea was a joke anyway so why not make the concept even dumber? lol
My intitals would be cc lol.
@@zypper7213 honestly, that doesnt sound that dumb. Like catch would be cattch and cash would be cach. That makes sense to me tbh.
Although K is fine imo, its consistent aside from the silent thing which only happened because we got lazy.
this is a great video! i remember the spelling reform going into effect just after i started going to school :D and i do very much prefer it to the way it was before, the consintency of pronounciation is just satisfying. they did change some other stuff, like some single words: photo became foto (picture) for example. the one that broke my heart was the change they made to dolphin: from "delphin" to "delfin". i dont know why but i really prefer the old way for that, it looks just so much nicer. thankfully im out of school now and can continue to keep delphin alive :D
lol I was a little bit confused when I started reading, as you have the Brazilian flag as your profile picture I actually thought you were talking about the Portuguese language
@@Mill_Jr haha, no the brazilian flag just rocks! :D
Wow... I'm German and I was never aware of the pronounciation rules you laid out. Very, very interesting, thank you very much!
Totally agree 👍 Do you have any idea how many times I have typed "LITTERALLY" in a text only to be CORRECTED into SPELLING it LITERALLY??
I feel like that literally should literally be litterally!
As a german who grew up with the new spelling rules, I’m glad that I didn’t have to learn and use the old spelling versions. Every time I read an older german text, I just see how confusing they sometimes were. Sadly our grammar rules are still terrible…
What still boggles my mind is that there used to be 52 comma rules
I’m learning german as a native english speaker, and honestly the grammar isnt _that_ confusing, though word order is kind of a mess
As a german who also grew up with the new rules, I'm still confused because they reformed the reform and changed the rules later on.
what if some people on the internet tried to make a project like this
Whot ar your propozelz?
@@juandiegovalverde1982 yas, eyed liek to no yor eydeah
@@juandiegovalverde1982 I have none but it would be cool
@@naimies8376 it coud be a gradual riform, oor e drastik woen.
@@juandiegovalverde1982 I mean I would say ur manner of writing is a bit much
Portuguese had a spelling reform (which took ages as it had to be agreed with Brazil). I'd love to see a video on it! Learning Portuguese, and reading childrens' books for practice. Some of the books in the local library are quite old and I find I'm wondering if spelling might be the reason why I sometimes can't find the words in the dictionary.
Isn't brazilian Portuguese considered a separate language nowadays? There have to be at least enough differences that both, the brazilian and portoguesean version are offered in language selections.
Please don't forget that because of the double consonants rule and the way word creation works in german we literally have words with triple consonants. Best examples probably are Schifffahrt or Geschirrreiniger.
One of the problems with trying to reform spelling (which usually means trying to make it more phonetic) is that the more closely coupled the spelling is to pronunciation, the farther away spelling becomes from the various regional dialects and accents. Somewhat imprecise spellings provide a sort of abstraction layer between the underlying phonology and the actual pronunciation in a dialect.
Thats why the entire video argued for a more moderate approach. Only take the rules that are unambiguous and apply them more consistently.
who tf care about dialect?
@@Yusuketh443 In languages where different countries have different dialects (like German, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, just to name a few), it matters a lot.
@@tookitogo it not even that different
@@Yusuketh443 You don’t know what you’re talking about.
One former rule with the "ß" was, that a word can never end with "ss". That is why words like "dass" and "muss" weren't possible but were "daß" and "muß".
That’s just wrong...
@@loganlloyd6930
Oh yeah? Then the teachers must explained it wrong to me.
@@HalfEye79 No, i mean like it looks so weird-i cant imagine any off those words with a ß
@@loganlloyd6930
Okay, then I misunderstood.
@@loganlloyd6930 Yes, which is why they fixed it. But german is full of stupid rules that are overcorrected for. Getting rid of them is nice. Next get rid of n-declination, overcorrection of adjective noun combinations..
An easier way to solve this is to introduce accent marks in English and adjust them to fit the rules of English. For example, we could use circumflex like French. "Anger" would not need one. But then we could write "Ângel" with one. We could say; "the farmer taught his sow to sôw". English used to have what German calls the umlaut although English had a different name for it that I can't remember now. It was used to show when double vowels were pronounced separately such as "coöperate". It could be used in words like "reädmit" or "reörder". Rather than changing spelling, this way, we'd just have to remember which marks to use.
Your described usage of umlaut is also in French. Signaling that a combination of letters is not creating the sound the usual combination rules would create. Like in aigüe, aïe, héroïne.
This is also how the umlaut is used in Spanish! In Spanish ‘gue’, ‘gui’ make a single sound (like guest and guilt in English), but ‘güe’ and ‘güi’ means that the u and e/i are pronounced separately, so it sounds like /gwe/ and /gwi/
I think you get the umlauts wrong. It's not a name for a certain letter, but a change in sounding, due to some other sound in or around the word (that might not be present anylonger in the modern language). In English there are umlauts, but mostly not orthographically marked like in German, e.g. the difference between man/men is due to an umlaut (in German Mann/Männer). Most umlauts are just written like their non-umlaut variant, but differenciated in speech.
@@Leo-uu8du That isn't what I said
@@ShonnMorris I know, you argued to use special accents on letters to show that they don't form a diphthong with another letter, without changing the sound of the letter that uses the accent symbol. An umlaut on the other hand is a change of a sound though.
Edit: To further clarify: You wrote that English used sth similar to what is called an umlaut in German, but what I percieved from your explanation is that it isn't even close to what an umlaut is. The whole similarity is about German umlauts often using some sort of accent mark (not all of them do)
as someone born in germany and also someone who pretty much went through the spelling reform while being in school, I have to say it was quite confusing at first. I still remember learning having to write "daß" instead of "dass" and a year later suddenly not anymore lmao. And then when I grew older I slowly learned more and more changes that didn't make sense to me like "telephon" or "telefon"
But! Alas this video showed me a completely new perspective that my naive brain all these years forgot about, consistency in spelling! That also explains the "telephon" into "telefon" change itself now, since ph is usually used in the beginning of words, I believe? I'm not a language expert, but this video surely enlightened a little area I haven't seen before, thanks for that! Great video!
The german speaking part of switzerland got rid (or never had?) of the eszet. As a german speaking swiss i didn't know what all the fuss was about. And thanks to you as an english speaker i now do.
PS the lack of use of the eszet makes everyone aware that you're swiss.
4:12 That's not fully correct. In Switzerland we don't use the "ß" at all and as far as I know never did or at least haven't used it in a very long time.
yes this is true, Switzerland did technically adopt the reform but maintains its "in der Schweiz kann man immer ss schreiben". The reform just didn't really change anything there lol
Honestly i think the spelling reform that i like the most is bringing back þ and ð, not because it’s just a better way of doing things, but just because i like the symbols lol
@music______________i cannot think of any advantages of doing this
also why and ? why not be consistent and go with and , or and ?
I feel like English just might be too far gone for any meaningful spelling reforms. It has a much more complicated history and evolution than, for example, the German language.
I'm trying to learn German and this helped with my pronunciation with your explanation of the letters, thanks a ton
That was a good suggestion for spelling reform in English! I’ve been thinking deeply about how it would be possible to reform English spelling. The most major problem I can see is that it’s now the de-facto language of the internet and also that now, many American vernaculars would be almost forced upon the British isles (this is also an issue that would also face the Americans should a British focussed spelling reform happen, or at least I believe). It’s been left too late to make reasonable changes. Also, potentially the different origins of many of the words we have today whether they are Germanic or Romance in origin could complicate things to where one rule would work for one, and not the other. However, if anybody can reform it to any useful degree, then I’m 100% for it.
As a German who has only lived in the age of the spelling reform I can confidently say that I absolutely detest it and I still use "daß" unless I have to write something official. I am proud of the letter ß and hate seeing it get used so much less. Languages should have their irregularities and inconsistencies and quirks. That is the fun of learning languages! If we wanted to just make things easier we could simply start writing everything the way it sounds. But nah. I like my daß and keep using it. Just like it's "Potential" and not "Potenzial" and "Photografie" and not "Fotografie".
The old rules made no sense, tho. The sole purpose of ß is to have a way of writing the long vowel - sharp s combination, in every other context it makes no sense to use it. Spelling changes, that's just how it is. If nobody adapted to it we'd still be stuck with Middle High German
@@leDespicable I agree they made no sense. Using similar logic we could get rid of irregular verbs too though. I think it is absolutely beautiful when languages have exceptions and inconsistencies. Latin has so many words that have weird af declinations and special meanings when used with a special word etc. I wouldn't want it any other way, I still love Latin and view it as the best candidate for a Europe-wide language should the EU ever decide to adopt something as a official EU language. Languages should be allowed to have irregularities and inconsistencies. Languages don't have to be easy either. If they should, let's abandon our intricate case system we have in Germany as well. Let's abolish irregular verbs and get rid of grammatical gender. We could do all of that to make things easier. Cause sure it makes no sense that in German the table is male, the corpse is female, the hole neuter, beauty female and hate male etc. Are you in favour of making langauage as easy as possible and eradicating any and all imperfections, exceptions and irregularities?
Lastly: Yes. Language and Spelling change. I acknowledge that. But that change is only ever brought forward by those speaking the language. It doesn't have to change. If people were committed enough to it we could keep languages entirely unchanged if we wish, except for some minor changes like adding words for new inventions etc. "If nobody adapted to it we'd still be stuck in Middle High German". Yes. And why would that be a bad thing? Nothing wrong with it. Language ever evolves. Sometimes for the worse, sometimes the better. Which of the two it does is a matter of subjective opinion. In my opinion right now I think it is developing for the worse. And I am entitled to speak in whichever manner I deem appropriate and fitting - hence I choose the old spelling. Nothing wrong with it.
Wenn schon, dann "PhotograPHie", bitte, mein lieber Herr Moß! 😉
Aua.
Dir ist schon bewusst, dass "Photographie" und Potential nicht falsch sind, oder? Du darfst beides schreiben, hat nix mit neuer Rechtschreibung zu tun. Die neueren Formen sind nur zusätzlich anerkannt.
"daß" macht nur leider null Sinn innerhalb der Rechtschreibung. Es führt zu Widersprüchen. Außerdem stimmt es überhaupt nicht, dass ß weniger vorkommt. Andere Wörter, die früher mit ss geschrieben wurden, schreibt man heute immerhin mit ß. Strasse -> Straße.