Also, please be civil this person was actually pretty chill about getting totally destroyed for this crazy take. I mostly just wanted to document this moment.
Also, please be civil this person was actually pretty chill about getting totally destroyed for this crazy take. I mostly just wanted to document this moment.
You know, they’ve got a very valid point. Language is spoken before it is written and it changes with time. I’ve got the opinion that orthography should be subordinate to pronunciation. If ‘then’ and ‘than’, historically pronounced differently, become homophone, they could be written the same.
I’m tired of English and French orthographies being so conservative, writing words like they were pronounced hundreds of years ago…
But a differentiation is needed in this scenario. “Then” suggests a continuation, while “Than” suggests an alternative.
“I’d rather eat cake than have a pineapple up the bum” “I’d rather eat cake then have a pineapple up the bum”
I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t be saying the second sentence verbally.
It is important to consider how best to communicate such requests. Perhaps as part of a sonnet would be appropriate?
I know that the words are different and have different meanings, and I know that some speakers pronounce them differently so I wouldn’t change the orthography now.
My point is: let’s not be so conservative that orthography has to be fixed forever. If they become homophones, the orthography could change and they could be homonyms like so many others exist.
Since when is there “the” English way of pronouncing stuff? Same for French? I learned to pronounce then and than differently and stumble while reading if it is misspelled.
“I’m used to it” is a pretty lousy excuse for an orthographic system. It’s the very definition of conservatism.
And yeah, you raise a valid point! In standardized languages, there is a linguistic effect of “speak like printed” but that’s emergent and not the initial purpose of orthography. The goal of orthography is to transpose a spoken language to writing.
This was actually a problem faced by German orthographists. The letter ‘ä’ was being pronounced /ɛː/ even if the vowel was not part of German phonology. That’s where the term “speak like printed” comes from (“sprechen wie gedruck”).
More info here.
Oh I disagree in the conservatism because my argument is: we can’t normalize written language because the phonetics in one language is wastly different in different regions and either we go to the pre Grimm “everyone writes as they speak” or there’s normalization.
That’s what confuses me: your definition of what the orthographic systems are supposed to solve differs from what l got taught: That people started writing preserve information - the phonetic alphabets were then adopted because (oversimplification!) it was easier.
My professor of historic German (Mittelhochdeutsch, not sure of the proper translation) always joked about the “sprechen wie gedruckt” people in Germany who claimed to talk “proper” German because of all the changes in language which get reflected over time into the main language (do you go “zu Aldi” or “nach Aldi” for example are regional directional expressions.
What is preserved is the clear meaning of things and standardization.
To get back to the OP: The standards are needed to prevent phonetic writing to alter the meaning of a sentence away from what the senders intend or puts a burden onto the reader to decipher. And that’s the risk when mixing relation and time (than/then).
From my perspective the discussion comes down to “who puts energy into the communication, the sender or the reader”. And for a lot of these examples it is less energy for the author than it is for the reader to then establish a common understanding.
That said: I find it fascinating to read such a different take on that topic and learn new things, thank you!
Thank you for your insightful reply and for engaging in discussion!
I absolutely agree with your stance on standardization. I’m confronted directly to this issue with the Walloon language. There has been no standardization and the current “Feller” orthographic consensus is to mix analogy to French (to facilitate the intuitive writing by French speakers), and phonetics (every author writes with its personal pronunciation). So there’s a gazillion ways of writing the same word and it has definitely been an issue for the language survival. Standardization is useful because it does include some amount of abstraction so that the same orthography can be used by speakers of different regions with their local variation of the language.
That being said, there is an actual effort for standard orthographies to agree with phonetics. The orthographies of standardized languages such as German (last reform in 1996), Dutch (last reform in 2006), Portuguese (last reform in 1990) have been modified and updated so that they reflect changes that took place in the pronunciations and simplify obsolete rules. French has actually a very phonetic orthography from the… 12th century. The last in-depth reform of French orthography was 1835, with a small-scale rectification in 1990 that’s been largely opposed. As for English, the reforms are even rarer with a single successful reform in 1828 for American spelling. That’s what I meant by conservatism. I wouldn’t call German orthography conservative at all, to the contrary.
In the case of “then/than”, like I said there’s no need to reform their spelling because they are not homophones for everyone. I do however think that their use is significantly different so that homonyms wouldn’t alter understanding. Difficulties would mainly arise from habit. In the example given by @[email protected]:
are theoretically already pronounced identically by some native speakers. Why is there no misunderstanding orally? I guess either the intonation that can be marked by a comma, or the addition of “and”:
No more ambiguity.
My own comment on the thread is relevant to yours 😁
https://lemm.ee/comment/11744844
Oh, I know the English rules very well, and those of French, and those of Dutch, and those of Portuguese, and those of German.
Of all the orthographies that I know, French and English are the dumbest by far, because they are the most conservative. It’s not because you struggled to learn that you should feel superior to others. Pride in a dumb orthographic system can only be understood through elitism.