Pointless Threads: Changing the English Language

[Torpede]

@Shaktal

@ Jingles:

Arabic only has 28 Letters and Russian 33. That is not a huge number of letters. And the more letters you have, the smaller your words become, the faster it becomes to write. It is an advantage to have lots of letters.

@Jingles

but you could pronounce f with ph, and it is not redundant, and anyway, before you go on at the English language for having the huge number of 26 letters, look at languages like Japanese, Arabic, Mandarin, Russian. Japanese has about 3 alphabets I think.

I speak arabic. It’s a VERY phonetic language and the letters are absolutely necessary.

You can’t compare the arabic alphabet to the english alphabet. there are sounds you can make with the arabic alphabet impossible to pronounce with english letters. The reason they have 28 letters is because it’s necessary for the language. English doesn’t need 26 letters.

And no, ph doesn’t pronounce fffff, technically.

As I implied in my first post, just because you’re told ‘ph’ pronounces ‘ffff’ doesn’t mean it does. Just because you’re told “colonel” pronounces “kurnel” doesn’t mean it does.

[Jingles]

I know, but I was just saying that they have more letters than us, the OP was saying that we had too many letters. Also, the Japanese kanji has a letter for most common words, so that is quite cool/easy to write.

[Torpede]

@Jingles

I know, but I was just saying that they have more letters than us, the OP was saying that we had too many letters. Also, the Japanese kanji has a letter for most common words, so that is quite cool/easy to write.

Point taken.

[Brother_Shrike]

https://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?t=3540

on a semi related note, in latin there are a lot of letters that are treated as two letters (x is treated as two consonants, ks, when scanning, for example) and a lot that are treated as one (qu-> one consonant)

[sersoft]

@Shaktal

the more letters you have, the smaller your words become, the faster it becomes to write. It is an advantage to have lots of letters.

Russian on an english keyboard sucks though, you have to press the [ ] ; ’ , . / ` keys for the extra letters.

[bur]

@Shaktal

@ Jingles:

Arabic only has 28 Letters and Russian 33. That is not a huge number of letters. And the more letters you have, the smaller your words become, the faster it becomes to write. It is an advantage to have lots of letters.

By that logic the ideal would be to have one letter for each word, which is definitely not an advantage.

[sersoft]

The Chinese have already tried that.

I can’t even imagine the size of a complete chinese keyboard, if it were ever to be made…

[Winged_One]

Just coming in. tl;dr to the thread, BUT:

Language in general is a natural phenomenon among humans, both on a biological and social level. As such, it evolves quite naturally, through new generations, addition of words for new things, children growing up speaking a pidgin (children will actually add grammar and regularize it, effectively creating a new language), etc. Therefore, it is constantly changing and adapting.

[shifty]

[quote=“Jingles”]
no, and the Americans have already done that with lots of our words./

[QUOTE]
English doesnt only belong to you, its for everyone to share. You selfish prick

[Winged_One]

Uh oh, your tags are showing!:retard:

[Dr_Strangelove]

How embarrassing.

[baconeggs]

This thread is in no way original:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

[Jingles]

@Burbinator

By that logic the ideal would be to have one letter for each word, which is definitely not an advantage.

Japanese Kanji does that too.

@shifty

@Jingles

no, and the Americans have already done that with lots of our words./

English doesnt only belong to you, its for everyone to share. You selfish prick

I was reffering to England when I said our.

[Winged_One]

@Jingles

Japanese Kanji does that too.

Which is stolen from Chinese.

[Lolipopman]

If english were to make sense, they should take away “W”. And they need to take away “C”. And add “Å”, “Ä” and “Ö”.

And make it swedish.

[Seba]

The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has beenreached to adopt English as the preferred language for Europeancommunications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British government conceded that Englishspelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phasedplan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for short). In the first year, “s” will be used instead of the soft “c”. Sertainly,sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard “c” will be replaced with “k”. Not only will this klear upkonfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when thetroublesome “ph” will be replaced by “f”. This will make words like"fotograf" 20 per sent shorter. In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expektedto reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have alwaysben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes ofsilent “e"s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go. By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th"by “z” and “w” by " v”. During ze fifz year, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining"ou”, and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations ofleters. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in zeforst place…

[Brother_Shrike]

@Lolipopman

If english were to make sense, they should take away “W”. And they need to take away “C”. And add “Å”, “Ä” and “Ö”.

And make it swedish.

why the hell would you take away W? It has an actual use.

inb4
<— the joke
o <— your head
+
^

ololol

[Lolipopman]

Well, if we made every single language swedish, we wouldn’t need W, since not a single swedish word has W in it AFAIK.

[Jingles]

If we made every single language welsh we would have no need for vowels (joke)

[Marb]

Just to backtrack a bit…

@Hazzmat

Englishmen say metre, Americans say meter.

Aside from any accent, are you saying there really is a difference between pronouncing meter and metre? Because as far as I know, I’ve never heard an Englishman pronounce it “mee-treh” or any other way for that matter.

But more on topic, I’ve always thought the English alphabet was terribly inefficient (at least the Americanized version)… but, I guess that’s what you get when a country is born of many different nationalities and borrows from many different languages. It changes over time to suit it’s own needs, but I’ll be honest, things like “bouquet” changing to “bokay” is just laziness, imho. (ok, so bokay is far from “official,” but I’ve been seeing it for years and it ticks me off for some reason)