Only if you accept that English is a garbage language and reform it so the rest of the world has to learn a sensible language instead of the clusterfuck that is english.
My thought is: Everyone can speak English, but spelling is just terrible. Make it phonetically consistent. Easiest transition, but of course you are still stuck with… English (words, grammar, quirks).
The good thing about Spanish is that if you know the rules, you know how to pronounce a word when you see it written. However, if you hear it, it is ambiguous as to how it is written. So my proposal for spanish makes each letter have 1 sound and 1 sound only. And each sound is represented by a single letter.
A similar thing to that would already massively improve English. And that’s just changing how the words are written, without changing the grammar at all.
Notice how that changes the easiest part of the language to change. You don’t need to change grammar, or words used, or pronunciation.
Just having the sounds and the text be consistent with each other makes the language massively easier to learn. In addition, you wouldn’t have one different way to pronounce each word per town in England. So even if you learned English from a texan, you would still be able to communicate perfectly with a Liverpool Englishman.
Even if local accents form, everyone would know how to fall back to the “correct” pronunciation if they see they’re talking to a foreigner and are having trouble communicating.
Of course, all other aspects of English are a clusterfuck too, but you gotta start somewhere. And I think it’s best to start with the high impact low hanging fruit.
EDIT: I just noticed I didn’t completely read your comment. My proposal is basically the same.
I’m not sure if the language is good or bad. If it’s the most spoken currently, it seems like it’s a shoe in for our DnD common language, though. No favoritism, just using stats to decide.
also hot take: US schools should teach 100–300 most common kanji (their meanings and pronunciations in Mandarin) if nothing else to dispel the myth that logograms are “too hard to learn” for English speakers
Yeah, as fucky as English is, as hard as it can be to learn, it’s currently the lingua franca ;)
Plus, because it’s a language that loves borrowing words and phrases, it’s already set up with an ease of integration to a limited extent.
At this point, any effort to displace it as the default is going to cause as much trouble and hassle as it’s place as the default does.
That being said, a language like Esperanto would be a better choice overall. It’s kinda like how Latin can serve as a neutral and fixed language because it’s dead. Esperanto isn’t dead, but it’s similarly fixed, and not tied to a single culture, so it would work. Then again, so would Latin
“But Esperanto is the future!”
Hot take: Everyone should accept that English is the common language, and only speaking one language is a setback.
Only if you accept that English is a garbage language and reform it so the rest of the world has to learn a sensible language instead of the clusterfuck that is english.
What’s your proposal?
My thought is: Everyone can speak English, but spelling is just terrible. Make it phonetically consistent. Easiest transition, but of course you are still stuck with… English (words, grammar, quirks).
I actually have a proposal for my own language (spanish). It’s written in a jokingly manner, but here it is: https://github.com/Calcoph/espa-ol-dos
The good thing about Spanish is that if you know the rules, you know how to pronounce a word when you see it written. However, if you hear it, it is ambiguous as to how it is written. So my proposal for spanish makes each letter have 1 sound and 1 sound only. And each sound is represented by a single letter.
A similar thing to that would already massively improve English. And that’s just changing how the words are written, without changing the grammar at all.
Notice how that changes the easiest part of the language to change. You don’t need to change grammar, or words used, or pronunciation.
Just having the sounds and the text be consistent with each other makes the language massively easier to learn. In addition, you wouldn’t have one different way to pronounce each word per town in England. So even if you learned English from a texan, you would still be able to communicate perfectly with a Liverpool Englishman.
Even if local accents form, everyone would know how to fall back to the “correct” pronunciation if they see they’re talking to a foreigner and are having trouble communicating.
Of course, all other aspects of English are a clusterfuck too, but you gotta start somewhere. And I think it’s best to start with the high impact low hanging fruit.
EDIT: I just noticed I didn’t completely read your comment. My proposal is basically the same.
I had a great chuckle at your GitHub, must have taken a while! You have my vote. Gracias por compartir!
I’m not sure if the language is good or bad. If it’s the most spoken currently, it seems like it’s a shoe in for our DnD common language, though. No favoritism, just using stats to decide.
also hot take: US schools should teach 100–300 most common kanji (their meanings and pronunciations in Mandarin) if nothing else to dispel the myth that logograms are “too hard to learn” for English speakers
If it’s Mandarin, they’re hanzi, kanji is specifically Japanese 😝
In 3 months, you could learn 300 at 5 per school day. That’s not even too crazy.
TIL what kanji are called in Mandarin (I’m a weeb and have only studied Japanese haha)
Hah, same for the most part. I have a lot of Chinese friends though, so have learned a tiny bit about Mandarin.
Yeah, as fucky as English is, as hard as it can be to learn, it’s currently the lingua franca ;)
Plus, because it’s a language that loves borrowing words and phrases, it’s already set up with an ease of integration to a limited extent.
At this point, any effort to displace it as the default is going to cause as much trouble and hassle as it’s place as the default does.
That being said, a language like Esperanto would be a better choice overall. It’s kinda like how Latin can serve as a neutral and fixed language because it’s dead. Esperanto isn’t dead, but it’s similarly fixed, and not tied to a single culture, so it would work. Then again, so would Latin
Only because it was never alive to begin with
Lmmfao! Yeah, it never even had a chance, unfortunately
Yeah, English is the most spoken language in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers