From my post: "Starting today, I resolve to never make another spelling or grammar flame. For informal forums, I may gently encourage others to stop making such corrections as well." - Stephen Mack

Sweet. As I'm a terrible speller. And generally have bad grammer (and yes I'm misspelling that on purpose. grammar just doesn't seem right to me. Let the evolution begin). :) - Dario Gomez

Dario, I don't think I've ever seen you misspell a word prior to that, so you're far from a terrible speller. I agree "grammar" looks weird. There aren't nearly as many words ending in -ar in English as -er. Kelsey Grammer also has a lot to answer for. But I certainly can get behind your proposal that "grammer" should be a valid substitute for "grammar" from now on. For English to evolve we'll also need to get the spell checks on board. - Stephen Mack

I don't think I have the patients for this. - Brian Johns

If by 'evolve' you mean 'dumb down for the un- and miseducated', I'll take an unevolved English any day of the weak. - Akiva Moskovitz

Certainly took me a while to get past that point of view, Akiva. But to take the first example of my post, why do we put up with irregularities? Why make it so hard for new learners and non-native speakers to learn? WHY do you feel the way you feel beyond wanting others to have to go through the hurdles you went through? - Stephen Mack

That's precisely it, though, Stephen. Flattening the learning curve doesn't make it better and it isn't that I want people to have to go through what I went through: this isn't about me; it's about being educated. Taking this to its horrifying conclusion, you might as well champion for the dismissal of complex words. Why use 'extrapolate' instead of 'explain' or 'loathe' instead of 'hate'? Because these more difficult/advanced/complex words are more apropos (oh, is that word too complex? how about 'succinct'? oh damn.). You'd be robbing the language of all of its beauty and utility. I, for one, refuse to 'idiot-proof' a language by changing the language to make it easy for 'idiots'. Instead, let's work toward better education: higher-paid teachers, smaller classrooms, easier and cheaper access to learning resources. - Akiva Moskovitz

If English is so hard to learn, why do I hear many Polish adults speaking better English here in the UK than British children in schools? Simply because the kids aren't being taught well enough and the resources are too few and too late. The problem lies within the education, not the language itself. - Charlotte M

Akiva, I'm not advocating the removal of words. I'm advocating simpler spelling -- similar to Benjamin Franklin's original proposal, which I'll link in separately. English evolves over time whether you want it to or not ("doughnut" to "donut" in American English, for example). Is someone "less educated" for wanting spelling to be simpler, so that learners can acquire the language faster? I don't want to rob the language of anything except pointless irregularity. - Stephen Mack

I dated a linguistics major once who was pretty adamant about language needing to be allowed to evolve, and was NOT the type to constantly correct others. However, I think that there's a difference between "letting grammarians die" and having them "loosen up" (losen up? lol) a bit. The bigger question, I think, is how organic we let the evolution be. For example, if we let lolcats-speak gain too much inflooense [sic], we've let the reigns go too much. - G. Sigh

Charlotte, English is objectively more irregular than, say, Spanish or Polish, and is therefore harder to learn. Of course non-native speakers learn English successfully all the time. But for those who learned several languages, ask them which was easier to learn. English has notably higher barriers than many languages because of the pervasive irregularities. We could reduce the amount of time by simplifying, that's all I'm saying. - Stephen Mack

Re: "Bad spelling as a signifier for low intelligence is a deeply-ingrained bias in our culture", It's interesting because my dad is an intellectual, but a terrible speller - [anecdotally] it seems has more to do with personality than actual intelligence. He just has other people (i.e. my mom, a grammarian) proof-read anything he sends out there. That said, in this age of computer-communication, even my web-browser, IM clients, and my iPhone have spell-checking, the red-squiggles appear under my misspelled words. - G. Sigh

I have to go with Akiva on this one. English is hard to learn? Practice. When you practice something it gets "easier" not because the nature if the thing changes but that your capacity to do thing has increased. - Josh Haley from iPhone

English seems to have done OK despite the grammarians: It's use continues to embiggen. - Andy Dustman

Personally I like my education/intelligence to shine through. Although, I do type "slang" in conversational posts. - MicahBear78

Let's look at what rational reason there is to NOT reform and and simplify English spelling. If you've spent any time teaching reading to a young child you know how many irregularities there are. It adds complexity and difficulty, so there are costs, but with what benefit? We have: 1. Tradition. "But we've always spelled things this irregularly." Not true, and not rational. Spelling in the 1800s was much looser. And conserving things solely for the sake of inertia and historical preservation is not a rational reason to prevent useful change. 2. Elitism. Those who can spell/write correctly and have mastered the irregularities are part of a select club, and recognizing who else is in that club by their writing is sometimes useful. But that's not enough of a rational basis to give up the benefits of spelling reform. The benefits including not just easier learning for children and non-native speakers, but faster typing and ease of implementation for things like cell-phone predictive typing. - Stephen Mack

Perfect case in point: Josh's comment. FF helpfully marks it as coming from the iPhone. His two typos ("if" instead of "of" and the missing "that") are clearly artifacts of that communication device. But did I understand him? Perfectly (even if I disagree). Why get hung up on that? As long as communication was achieved, that's my new standard of acceptance. Josh is correct that practice makes perfect, but WHY should we inflict all that extra effort on new learners of English? What's the DRAWBACK to spelling/grammar reform? - Stephen Mack

And Andy, I love love love that comment. - Stephen Mack

Perhaps the reason you understood Josh's comment despite the errors is because of context. If you were reading it centuries later in isolation there would be room for doubt as to what he really meant. - Trish Haley

Trish, true, but let centuries go by and suddenly you're reading Chaucer: "Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote" (http://www.canterburytales.org/canterb...) What a perfect illustration of how spelling changes over time. ("When April with its showers sweet / has pierced the drought of March to the root") - Stephen Mack

Now we have to take into account accents and pronunciations to decipher that. - Trish Haley

Chaucer wasn't just about spelling differences. Take it down the absolute basics and you have phonics, blending the sounds to make a full pronunciation of that word. If simplifying words is the way forward, then the phonics are changed and in turn, so is the word. - Charlotte M

Charlotte, I agree -- and think that's a good thing, with many advantages, and no disadvantages beyond "that's the way we've done it for a while now." - Stephen Mack

A friend with a linguistics background who uses it practically in his day-to-day life explained the ebb and flow of language (which is mostly an unplanned phenomenon) like this: Language trends toward simplicity if sufficient comprehension is conserved. It moves toward more complexity when ambiguity interferes too greatly. So my theory is there will always be grammarians and anti-grammarians, it's just that their number and degree of influence will also ebb and flow. - Micah Wittman

Sorry but if I have to trust a Ste[ph|v]en on this, I'm going to trust Pinker over Mack. - Akiva Moskovitz

Also, well put, Micah. - Akiva Moskovitz

No one show this thread to Mignon. - Matthew DeVries

I haven't blogged much, so I keep going to this well, but dammit, read my post! http://dariusmdev.wordpress.com/2009... - Matthew DeVries

English is still evolving and the UKians will continue blaming the Yanks for ruining the language even tho they themselves were mutilating it long before we existed. :) - Joe Silence is not dead

Sounds like you're asking for intelligent design here. You can't get rid of grammarians if you want evolution to work. They're the only natural predators irregularities have. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Wow, Bruce. That's just... wow. You're comparing people who care about the English language with people who don't believe in evolution because of a belief in a creator deity? That's such a wild comparison that my monitors just degaussed themselves. And they're LCD monitors. Are you going to lump mathematicians in here as well? They're bigger sticklers than grammarians are. - Akiva Moskovitz

Spellings I'm not too bothered about, but grammar is an essential part of the written form. Without it the entire meaning of prose gets screwed up. Still, regardless of this and irrespective of how many rules you put into place, a language will change and evolve along with the people that speak it. Imagine how things will change once we take to the stars. - alphaxion

Akiva, Pinker is a nativist -- very very far from a prescriptivist. He describes the evolutionary models of language in great detail. I cannot recall him writing about spelling reform one way or the other. How is he relevant to this discussion? - Stephen Mack

Wait, I'm proposing unnatural predation on irregularities! Brain hurts, must consider. - Stephen Mack

I don't see spelling as independent of syntax. - Akiva Moskovitz

Fine, Akiva, so let's take a few spelling examples. Suppose I'm elected supreme dictator of the universe, and I issue a decree that says from now on, all the "-ight" words in English that rhyme with "night" (might, right, sight, etc.) are to be spelled "-ite" instead. ADVANTAGES: Consistency, ease of learning, fewer letters to type. DISADVANTAGES: Spell checkers, dictionaries, grammarians must change. People who resist change get upset. Where would you weigh in? It's been centuries since we pronounced the g as a g in these words. Why not excise, simplify, reform? - Stephen Mack

Akiva, no. I'm being a stickler about English usage myself. The word "evolve" is being misused here. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Bruce, ah, sorry. Totally went right over my head. - Akiva Moskovitz

Bruce, I disagree. The "doughnut" to "donut" change is a perfect example of evolution in action. Look at that Chaucer excerpt earlier. All of the changes follow an evolutionary model -- things get simpler over time, due to survival of the fittest. Even Pinker, evoked earlier, describes the evolutionary model of language change similar to what we're discussing here. - Stephen Mack

Matthew, I read your post but I'm too dense to see the point you're making, sorry. - Stephen Mack

I find it ironic that Akiva misused weak when he meant week. :) - Alex Scoble

Stephen, sorry, but this discussion is slowly edging its way off the rails. The hypothetical you invoke is just way too unlikely to even be worth addressing, if you ask me. I might as well say, 'what if as the supreme dictator of the universe, I made red into blue'? - Akiva Moskovitz

@Bruce the collectivised mutations of something (language in this case) that eventually give rise to the formation of a distinct and new entity. The changes to our languages are organic in nature and certainly paralelle that of species in the natural world via many different evolutionary pressures (technology, interbreeding, random mutations as a result of generational change....) - alphaxion

There's no advantage to turning red into blue. There are numerous advantages to simplifying and regularizing spelling. My main point is to get you to consider WHY you want spelling to stay the same illogical way it is now, when it has no advantages beyond preserving (a fairly recent, in the scale of things) tradition. - Stephen Mack

Stephen, evolution creates as many irregularities as it eliminates. Why are there two correct spellings of harassment, for example. English will only get simpler by deliberate planning. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

I do think the prescriptivists are fighting a futile war. But spelling reform is just another form of prescriptivism. I say, tolerate diversity and let natural selection hone orthography. If more people favor nite over night or the single word loose instead of the two words loose/lose, then that's the way the language will go. Nothing you or I can do is going to stop it. - Victor Ganata

Stephen, the point is, you can't regulate either spelling nor grammar. They can and will change over time. - alphaxion

(Gah, three excellent comments within seconds of each other, and I want to respond to all three. Want threaded comments.) - Stephen Mack

Too much pretty would never have happened in Stephen's world. - Matthew DeVries

Threaded comments are hideous. Take the time, read slow and read it all. Compose your thoughts and say what you need to. You have no where important to be. - Matthew DeVries

Matthew, I'm missing the "too much pretty" reference. - Stephen Mack

(Pounces, claws extended, on the either/nor pairing in alphaxion's comment.). :-) - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Well Eye'd explane it beter, but sea, yu've removed all werds I need to make my point. I'm left with nuthing to rephyne my thawts. - Matthew DeVries

Let me be clear: The dictator example is a hypothetical, and I'm not actually advocating we force wholesale spelling reform down anyone's throat. Instead, I'm asking people to examine their biases and beliefs. Previously I was a spelling snob. I made spelling flames. Despite believing in the abstract that I was a descriptionist, I was actually behaving as a prescriptivist. However, in the course of teaching my son to read, I have become disgusted with how irregular and complex English spelling is. It adds tremendous difficulty -- but for what purpose? There's no advantage to it. I believe that language evolves to a simpler form over time (which Bruce refutes, but I'll discuss that separately). In the past, I acted as a barrier to that evolution. But as of today, I resolve to not act that way, and to help foster the simplification that takes place naturally. That's my argument. - Stephen Mack

It's a legacy language, like Windows. It has to maintain backwards compatibility. People with your ideas tried that Esperanto movement way back when, because to get to where you want to be requires a full rebuild from the kernel up. Unfortunately language isn't an if you build it they will come sort of thing, so how bout we just leave it as it and let it evolve like it's supposed to, with proper pressures from where ever they come from and not advocate just taking the brakes off. Go watch an episode of Firefly. - Matthew DeVries

For English spelling reform, we may have to look to other languages to lead the way. Filipino, the official language of the Philippines (which is really just a standardized dialect of Tagalog) basically incorporates tons of English words, but has changed the orthography to match the conventions of written Filipino, which is close to being completely phonetic. I understand Japanese kind of does a similar transformation to English borrowings. Someday, I won't be surprised to see English borrowing words back from other languages, resulting in variants with significant nuanced differences. - Victor Ganata

Matthew, the Chaucer excerpt refutes the backwards-compatibility notion. I find Esperanto ridiculous, because it was mandated, not evolved. Almost no one wants to learn a whole new language just because they find English too complex or irregular. I agree with the rest of your comment. You illustrate the point I'm making perfectly. Before, I was acting as an agent resisting language evolution -- fighting off useful mutations by mocking them. But no more. That's what my post is about -- about a change I'm making in my own behavior. (And I love Firefly.) - Stephen Mack

My point, though, is that there have never been any brakes, and anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves. - Victor Ganata

Victor, we've done that already and continue to every day/year. - Matthew DeVries

Stephen, the Chaucer excerpt doesn't refute anything at all. It can't. It's inanimate, and kind of meta. - Matthew DeVries

It shows that language changes and doesn't have to be backwards-compatible. - Stephen Mack

Matthew, true. I just think it'll be more dramatic when we start borrowing back from languages that are completely outside the Indo-European family of languages. - Victor Ganata

Victor: English borrowing words from other languages is a fait accompli. - Andy Dustman

Victor: Suppose someone says to you, "Good nite!" and you say back to them, "You miseducated nincompoop, don't say 'nite,' it's spelled 'night.'" You are acting as a "brake" as you say. Right? - Stephen Mack

Stephen, No it doesn't. It's inanimate. It doesn't refute anything. It's can't. It doesn't possess the intelligence. - Matthew DeVries

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons. 'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. 'Well, I'm a panda', he says, at the door. 'Look it up.' The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.' - Matthew DeVries

Stephen start your sentence, "The Chaucer excerpt that I quoted illustrates....." At least I think that is what you are attempting to convey. - Matthew DeVries

Matthew, yes, that's what I mean -- apologies for use of metonymy as a grammatical shortcut. (And thank you for the literalist Panda joke.) - Stephen Mack

Matthew, that's one usage crusade you'll have to give up on. Information wants to be anthropomorphized. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Well played, Bruce. - Stephen Mack

Yeah, well played...... - Matthew DeVries

On a more serious note, I think Stephen is making a good move by loosening up on spelling as his son starts to read and write. That fits the methodology I've seen work really well in Montessori schools. - Bruce Lewis from fftogo

Yes, he should be well suited to a twitter dominant world. Make sure he takes AP LOLcat in highschool as well. - Matthew DeVries

Twitter's ability to influence language is probably substantial. - Stephen Mack

Stephen, yeah, I see your point. On the other hand, such a response might actually act as a accelerator, if the person I said it to thought I was someone not worth listening to. - Victor Ganata

Andy, true. I was specifically thinking of English borrowing words back from languages that had originally borrowed from English, which, yeah, we've already been doing. - Victor Ganata

Kids are good at unlearning. Empower them first. Tighten up spelling later. - Bruce Lewis

If I started 'loosening up on spelling', I'd never get a job because I'm a writer and am expected to produce literate and correct copy. - Charlotte M

Bruce L., you're exactly right, and it's very interesting to me that proper spelling is now hardly emphasized at all in the early grades. - Stephen Mack

Charlotte, I'm not suggesting all literate and correct copy be discarded wholesale. As I mention in the blog post, business communications are one venue where we place a huge emphasis on proper spelling and grammar, and that's not going to change for generations if at all. Really I'm trying to explain why for informal discussions (such as the ones here on FF) I'm interested in personally being less of a stickler. - Stephen Mack

Clearly spelling bees are corruptors of teh youth. Won't someone please think of the children? - Andy Dustman

Andy, did you see Spellbound? Freaky how much work is involved, for obscure words that most people have never heard of. I am all for intellectual competition, but the value of the top level of competition like that really escapes me. It seems to turn the kids into stress cases. - Stephen Mack

Stephen, I have not, but spelling bees are the intellectual equivalent of beauty contests. Memorization != rational thinking - Andy Dustman

Ah, good, then your previous comment was sarcastic. (I approve.) - Stephen Mack

I think there's enough nails in the coffin of this premise. I'm off to start my long weekend. - Matthew DeVries

Enjoy your weekend, Matthew! Don't worry, the zombie of this premise will dig its way out of the coffin over time. - Stephen Mack

Yes, there's a greasy red spot where the dead horse used to be. - Andy Dustman

Is there? I missed it. Better keep on kicking to be sure. - Stephen Mack

Amusingly, this is quite possibly the most grammatically- and syntactically-correct comment stream I have ever seen. - Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane

:) I certainly don't want anyone to accuse me of wanting English to evolve solely because I don't know how to speak it. And FFers are an unusually literate bunch. - Stephen Mack

Language will as language always has. It is a plastic, mutable thing, that changes from place to place, from generation to generation, from one media form to another. Old grammarians don't die, they get abbreviated. - Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane

A few years ago there was a news story that tracked the rate of decrease for irregular verbs. They predicted that in another 100 years only the most important irregular verbs will be around. That is kind of strange to predict where the language will go. - Rich Thomas

Slippy, I just dislike the people who hold on to the set or rules they learned like it is set in stone. - Rich Thomas

I think we all have a tendency to hold on to the rules we learned like they're set in stone. Otherwise, they'd just be guidelines :-) - Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane

I tried to resist, but here's an example of current day comment prose to dissect: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009... <----- endless linguistics theories will swirl around the reason for the strategic placement of the single comma, the only punctuation whatsoever therein (if you don't count ALL CAPS as punctuation). - Micah Wittman