Terralthra wrote:Spelling changes on the scale that have been proposed have never actually been attempted for English, so it's idiotic to expect me to produce successful attempts.
Fuck you. I asked you explicitly to name a successful attempt
on that scale. It's not my fault you provided a bunch of irrevelant examples, instead of just conceding the point immediately. The only idiocy is your own.
I have provided examples of top-down spelling changes
Which wasn't the question I asked.
(your quibble about ain't is stupid, it was not prevent a change, and the fact that you think it was only emphasizes how successful that 'academic snobbery' actually was).
I notice how you left out the other part of my "quibble": the fact that it's an example of a change five orders of magnitude smaller than what I asked for.
I'll concede that there has never been a successful restandardization of the English orthographic system....
Oh good. Perhaps on your next post, you can finally get around to addressing all other the problems I listed at the start of this debate.
because there hasn't been a serious multinational attempt to do so. As numerous posters have pointed out, other languages have been phoneticized successfully in the modern era.
None of them to the extent you're proposing, and none of those attempts faced all the problems specific to English.
So, a bunch of guys take turns paying you a lot of money and pointing a gun at you to get you to use a 2-gallon bucket with a hole at the 1-gallon mark. "It's not broken!" you say, "It still holds some water!"
If I have to walk a thousand miles and pay a billion dollars for a new bucket, yes, that's what I say, because it works
well enough. This is now the
third time I've made this point.
Terralthra wrote:So, let me get this straight. If you were to say, "Don't confuse phonetics and language, you fucktard," and I were to protest your swearing, it'd be a style over substance fallacy - resulting in a summary ban - but when I say something in a manner you don't like, protesting it is totally a legitimate point? It's funny how that works.
No, you imbecile, it's not a style-over-substance fallacy for me to say "You're wrong for reasons X, Y, and Z, and also, your tone makes you sound like an ass." It's only style-over-substance if I say "Your tone irritates me, so you're wrong." If you'd like to point out where I did that, go right ahead. Otherwise, you can stick that fallacy card up your ass.
Terralthra wrote:A cost-benefit analysis is effectively impossible, because the lion's share portion of the cost would be born by publishing houses, not the government, and the adoption rate of private purchasers would vary. Would you go out and rebuy every book you have with the new orthography? Would your parents? Would publishers republish their entire library in the new style, or just from now on?
You honestly think this is the only cost, or the biggest? How about the cost of training
every English teacher in the entire world in the new spelling? How about repriting every book of statutes and regulations? How about at least a generation of printing two English versions of every government form at every level, one for the old-style readers and one for the new? How about redesigning every English-language
website in the world? Restocking every library (I might not have to replace my personal library, but with a rising generation of new-style-only readers, every public library will have to)?
For that matter, you can't dismiss the cost to the private sector just because it's not being directly borne by the government. Every dollar (or pound or rupee) spent by the private sector to replace something spelled the old way is a dollar not invested in generating new revenue.
I also find it interesting how you start out by attempting to say that ESL speakers wouldn't like the changes in spelling, and when I address that, shift to native speakers instead.
Liar. The closest I ever came to saying the ESL speakers wouldn't like the changes is when I said "[radical spelling reform] strikes me as terribly unlikely given the obstacles to getting a billion people on six continents to agree to a completely new spelling system". Otherwise, I only mentioned ESL speakers in the context of how broken English spelling is or isn't. I made it clear in my very first post that I thought the largest obstacle was getting the
Anglophone countries to agree to and then implement spelling reform, which are obviously populated with--wait for it--native speakers. I'm sure beginning ESL learners would love spelling reform (though I'm wondering how much advanced ESL learners would appreciate putting all the effort into learning the old system, just to have it changed on them). Unfortunately for them, beginning ESL learners will not get to decide if, when, and how spelling reform on any scale is implemented.
