If you could change a language ...

[Arwon]

Clearly you have to pick one variant and stick with it. I assume it would be the lowest common denominator, so SAE for North America and R.P. for Britain. Devising a new orthography for each dialectal group would be impractical.

In my language, we have "spisovná ceština" as the standard. You can of course pronounce it weirdly if you insist on sticking with your local accent, but everybody is capable of reading it with the right pronunciation, it's almost fully phonetic, and it serves as an anchor for the language as a whole (so I can tell the Bohemians to frak off when they mangle it). Now, Czech is of course a very small language with some 10-11 million speakers. It naturally evolves towards greater homogeneousness. English is now the global lingua franca, and different accents/dialects are already undermining this role. It seems to me that having a pronunciation standard 'embedded' in the orthography would help protect it from diverging too much.

But then again, I don't care that much, it's not my native language.



p?n?nsjul?



b?tn



There are many ways of pronouncing English, we all get it. Not that I don't find what you're saying informative and pretty interesting, but it's kind of besides the point.



See above. English speakers need to get over their exceptionalism complex. It's a language like any other, and it should strive to achieve at least some degree of standardization, especially if it's supposed to serve as the global language of choice for the foreseeable future. Having a spelling-pronunciation disconnect of this magnitude is a recipe for future misunderstanding. That's just my humble opinion as a non-native speaker.

Yeah good luck coming up with a standard which reflects New Zealand, Irish, South African, Australian, Canadian etc Englishes too. You're simply never going to get the vowels to match, or stress and schwas, much less a common treatment of the rhotic. Improvements could be made to things like silent letters, but that's about it.

 

[Mango Elephant]

I support the American South coming up with a new language which although is like English, is a lot cooler. I suppose the rest of the Anglosphere sans England can copy our lead if they want (but they caint copy aur language because it aint thars)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

"Canadian English" varies widely. Some Newfoundland speakers are nearly incomprehensible to people in the West. And I'd bet that if Aimee and I were to meet in person and talk to each other, we would each think the other speaks with an accent (yes, there is a distinct Nova Scotian accent).

 

[say1988]

Yeah good luck coming up with a standard which reflects New Zealand, Irish, South African, Australian, Canadian etc Englishes too. You're simply never going to get the vowels to match, or stress and schwas, much less a common treatment of the rhotic. Improvements could be made to things like silent letters, but that's about it.

Don't even bother with that, just think about what would happen if they went to Texas and said they were going to base the spelling on the Amerian Midwestern pronunciation. You couldn't even come close to standardizing it within the US.

I would guess that any serious attempt to base the spelling on a pronunciation would either fail miserably (vastly more likely) or you would end up with other groups responding and doing the same based on their pronunciation.
Then instead of having a multitude of pronunciations with few signficant spelling differences, you have completely different spellings for each pronunciation.

Some standardization and adjustments will probably occur due to the proportion of ESL over native speakers and ever increasing communications between groups using different varieties of English. But any attempt to force such changes on a large scale will fail.

 

[metatron]

occur due to the proportion of ESL over native speakers

Whenever this comes up i remember that documentary on Bruxelles English with that guy explaining how everybody there uses the word "forseen" in a way no native speaker of English ever would.
You know, like prévoir, voorzien, vorsehen...

 

[Veles]

Are smileys acceptable as a substitute for punctuation signs?

: ).
-.-.
o_O.

They don't go nice together.

 

[Winner]

You are joking, of course.

I suppose there's some point to Standard American (though I wouldn't know). But RP really? Do me a favour. It's certainly not the lowest common denominator by any means. And it's not even a stable accent over time.

R.P. is *the* British English for a vast majority of people. The things they actually speak in Britain are

In my opinion (as someone who learned English as a 3rd language), one of the advantages of the English language is that it's so versatile..

Advantages in what way? Since it's so all over the place and non-standardized in terms of pronunciation vs spelling, it's easier to adapt to Jamaica, India, south-eastern Asia, or wherever else.

Well the problem I am talking about is that since everybody can pronounce it in whatever way they choose, its versatility as a global lingua franca is diminished. I really have trouble understanding the African English pronunciation variants, the Indian English isn't much better, and the crap they speak in some parts of the British Isles is utterly incomprehensible. This will get worse, not better, as English spreads and the numbers of ESL/EFL speakers grow.

Some sort of a standard pronunciation enforced through the standardised orthography would help. I have no illusion it will actually happen, it won't.

You try to adapt Latin to Slavic phonetics, you get things like Czech, Szczeczyn, vrt and so on. You get a ton of different adopted alphabets with varying degree of ridiculousness, which are still unreadable to unprepared speaker of other Latin script based language. "C" can be read in dozen of ways, as well as "Y". So if it doesn't help foreigners to read it outright, then what's the point? There are some sounds foreigners would have hard times to pronounce anyway. Most of the English speakers for example can't produce palatalized consonants. Also the sound that is rendered as "ы" in Cirilic and "y" in Polish. And also the difference between ш and щ (sz and szcz in Polish).

Bull. The adapted Latin script which is used for writing Czech is PERFECTLY suited to Czech phonology. Writing it in Cyrillic would actually be far more ridiculous. Please stop using Polish, which is widely known to have insane rules concerning spelling, to attack the Latin script, which has proven extremely adaptable and versatile. Even Asian languages can use it, for gods' sake, meaning Slavic languages are no exception from the rule.

Spoiler :

Blbost. Přizpůsobená latinka, kterou používáme k psaní češtiny, perfektně odpovídá české fonologii. Psát ji v azbuce by ve skutečnosti bylo mnohem absurdnější. Zkus prosím přestat používat polštinu, která se, jak všichni víme, píše naprosto šíleně, jako argument proti latince, která se jinak ukázala být extrémně všestrannou a přizpůsobivou. Dá se použít i pro asijské jazyky, probůh, čili slovanské jazyky nejsou žádnou výjimkou.

But seriously, Latin script is great. For Latin language. Which I fully endorse as the world-wide lingua franca. But keep your dirty hands away from the divine gift of Cirilic alphabet, which is a all progressive and cool-looking.

Cyrillic script is a great way to isolate yourselves from the mainstream of the Western civilization. Now, if that's your goal, be my guest. If not, you should think about switching to something more sensible.

Yeah good luck coming up with a standard which reflects New Zealand, Irish, South African, Australian, Canadian etc Englishes too. You're simply never going to get the vowels to match, or stress and schwas, much less a common treatment of the rhotic. Improvements could be made to things like silent letters, but that's about it.

As I said, pick a couple of standards, and use them. Nobody cares about New Zealand.

 

[Leoreth]

Are smileys acceptable as a substitute for punctuation signs?

: ).
-.-.
o_O.

They don't go nice together.

Even worse is to have smilies in parentheses (like this ;)).

R.P. is *the* British English for a vast majority of people. The things they actually speak in Britain are

"British people have no say in what British English sounds like!"

Cyrillic script is a great way to isolate yourselves from the mainstream of the Western civilization. Now, if that's your goal, be my guest. If not, you should think about switching to something more sensible.

Yeah, painting kyrillic as progressive when the trend is definitely going in the other direction is a little ridiculous. But I never know when Veles is serious with his argument and when he's just kidding.

 

[Borachio]

R.P. is *the* British English for a vast majority of people. The things they actually speak in Britain are

I see.

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion.

Especially if you don't mind being wrong.

RP is just a marker of the public-school-educated oik. I've no time for it. Or for the people who speak it.

 

[Winner]

"British people have no say in what British English sounds like!"

Exactly. Or more like, "British people of today have no say in what British English is supposed to sound like."

RP is just a marker of the public-school-educated oik. I've no time for it. Or for the people who speak it.

You know, one of the most amusing things about Britain is how frakking classist its society really is.

R.P. is/was an attempt to create a pronunciation standard that is understandable to all. Even though British classism and stupid accent oversensitivity eventually doomed this attempt, R.P. is still *the* British English foreign learners are aspiring to (if they bother with British English at all; since you people insist on dissing R.P., it's actually losing ground to SAE, so you can pat yourselves on the back and congratulate each other to a job well done). Nobody wants to (or can) speak the glottalstopish junk today's Brits use to communicate with each other.

 

[Borachio]

You know, one of the most amusing stupid/appalling things about Britain is how frakking classist its society really is.

R.P. is/was an attempt to create a pronunciation standard that is understandable to all can be used to differentiate those with money from those without.

Even though British classism and stupid accent oversensitivity eventually doomed this attempt, R.P. is still *the* British English foreign learners are aspiring to (if they bother with British English at all; since you people insist on dissing R.P., it's actually losing ground to SAE, so you can pat yourselves on the back and congratulate each other to a job well done). Nobody wants to (or can) speak the glottalstopish junk today's Brits use to communicate with each other.

Just talk properly and clearly. Forget about RP - it's for dunces.


Link to video.

 

[TheLastOne36]

Bull. The adapted Latin script which is used for writing Czech is PERFECTLY suited to Czech phonology. Writing it in Cyrillic would actually be far more ridiculous. Please stop using Polish, which is widely known to have insane rules concerning spelling, to attack the Latin script, which has proven extremely adaptable and versatile. Even Asian languages can use it, for gods' sake, meaning Slavic languages are no exception from the rule.

Insane? It makes perfect sense once you understand the rules.

 

[Arakhor]

Nobody wants to (or can) speak the glottalstopish junk today's Brits use to communicate with each other.

Funnily enough, just like not everyone speaks like BBC news reporters from the 50s any more, only a minority of people speak like the actors on Eastenders. I have never spoken with a glottal stop in my life.

 

[Winner]

Insane? It makes perfect sense once you understand the rules.

I didn't say it was inconsistently insane. Write anything in Polish and I bet that if the words aren't wildly different, it will be much shorter and easier to read when I write it in Czech. Actually, I could probably write Polish using Czech letters to the same effect. Polish has the worst of both worlds: digraphs everywhere AND weird diacritic marks.

Link to video.

I guess I would find it funny if I could understand the language the guy speaks.

 

[Leoreth]

The better my English became, the more "British" my accent became. Don't ask me which one it is, it's probably a nonexistent one that horribly embarrasses me as a foreigner trying to hard (Lena Meyer-Landrut English), but still. And I'm fond of glottal stops

 

[Farm Boy]

Wow, my wife has made me watch far too many British movies. He didn't seem that hard to understand. Only problem I have with trying to listen to that is I have to turn it up super loud or I miss things.

And for an earlier post, I don't think Texas qualifies as a Midwestern dialect. I'm pretty sure that's a Southern accent only Texified.

 

[Winner]

The better my English became, the more "British" my accent became. Don't ask me which one it is, it's probably a nonexistent one that horribly embarrasses me as a foreigner trying to hard (Lena Meyer-Landrut English), but still. And I'm fond of glottal stops

Meh, my favourite pastime is to pretend I and my friends are British in various pubs and restaurants around Brno (also, one girl can do the Irish accent pretty well, and another guy is reasonably good with the Scottish one). So far it has worked like a charm - the missing Rs and the R.P. accent sounds legit to most people around here who haven't studied English in any greater depth. Personally, I find the American accent much, much harder to imitate properly. Their retroflex Rs cause tongue spasms.

 

[Borachio]

I guess I would find it funny if I could understand the language the guy speaks.

Pretty ordinary/"standard" London accent, there. Nothing difficult about it.

Fairly fast though.

 

[Winner]

Pretty ordinary/"standard" London accent, there. Nothing difficult about it.

Fairly fast though.

I don't understand it, is the problem, and I am a fairly advanced ESL learner. I probably would understand it if I had better headphones and replayed the problematic parts a few times, but that's not the point - if this guy was speaking the 'BBC English', no matter how fast, I'd understand him perfectly. Thus, if there was to be a standard made for British English, I'd advise to base it on something people around the world can understand and recognize as British English.

Sigh. Never mind, I am tired of this topic and I don't care enough to continue talking about it anyway.

 

[Borachio]

OK. You do have a point, I'll admit. I personally have trouble understanding Indian sub-continent speakers, because their inflection is very different.

But hey variety is good. And English comes in all sorts of varieties. I think, even, in a Czech variety.

English accent is influenced by the native language of its speaker. Which is a bit of a problem if English is your mother tongue.