No. NO. NOOOOOOO!
How are these people even serious?
And what's next?
"Hmm...algebra is way too hard for kids to learn. Let's make a whole new, easier set of rules, beginning with that quadratic formula. [-b + and - sqrt (b^2-4ac)]/2a is now simply b + and - 2. All roots will universally be accepted as b + and - 2 going forward. Now we'll have lots of kids doing better at algebra."
Yeah, I remembered that formula off the top of my head, and yeah, that was me showing off just a tad.
Seriously, though, what kind of sense does it make to change an entire language because some people are too dumb to learn it properly? Seems like a scary precedent to me. I'd love to watch advocates of changing "learn" to "lern" try to learn Mandarin, where in addition to spelling, they'd have worry about roughly eight different intonations per syllable. Spelling "anyone" properly doesn't seem so bad now, does it?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Holy shit. Those kinds of spellings are what people have used to make fun of bad educational systems for ages… and they want to institutionalize it! Way to throw out centuries of etymology built into English spellings. If you're going to take latin and germanic roots and put them in the trash, you might as well just switch to an entirely new language. Why go to all the trouble of saying the word "edjewkashun" when you can just say "lernin", or "edukado" in Esperanto? These simple-minded fools seem to think that language is a crude implement to get your point across and then move on, and they're unaware of the richness and potential for allegory that they're stripping from the language. What's next, a campaign against synonyms, because learning more than one word for each meaning is too hard? Pathetic.
Interesting… I was just reading the comments on the article you linked to, and they have a very good point: this woman is basing her new spellings on the pronunciation of words, so you take universally accepted spellings and turn them into phonetic shorthand for mimicking certain sounds. BUT! Words are pronounced differently whether you're in New York, London, Sydney, or even Belize. This new set of rules could fragment the language into 5 (or more) different spellings for each word, depending on your personal accent. Its wholesale irreverence for the old rules of spelling sort of encourages people to make up their own spellings based on how they think it should be spelled, which is based on how they pronounce it. The rules for spelling become: spell it however you please! Anarchy! Everyone would have to read aloud to get any meaning from written English, because the scattershot spellings would be indecipherable at first glance. On the bright side, you could tell a person's accent by exactly how they butcher spellings in their writing. :)
What a retarded idea.
Post a Comment