Comment on American and British English spelling and pronunciations
jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks agoGoing by how ortography changes have gone in other languages, I doubt it.
Besides English, if English fix its ortography it’s going to become much harder to learn for speakers of other European languages - as confusing the pronunciation rules and exceptions are, they are caused by writing things similarly to other European languages while mangling the original pronunciation.
Lemmist@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
No, that’s a weak excuse. Nobody cares about the etymology of the word. It doesn’t help much for a Frenchman that 12 words in the whole English language are written the same way as in French. But ALL people (English native-speakers included) will profit from predictable spelling and pronunciation.
jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
As a native Portuguese speaker I found it very useful when I started to learn English. And even nowadays having some form of “visual map” between English and Portuguese at least for more erudite words - which tend to be the ones that are shared between more languages - helps me write English better.
The similarities between English and German also ended up helping me learn German.