How about divorcing pronunciation from orthography (as in Chinese, where the same written character has the same meaning everywhere, whether the speaker pronounces the character in Mandarin, Cantonese, or any of the other langauges spoken in China).
Oh. Wait: we already have that, as when the Southerner says 'peen' to name the object I call a 'pen.'
Dr. Seth Katz
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Bradley University
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Wollin, Edith
Sent: Mon 8/17/2009 3:24 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: If I were the language god...
Oh, no, I'm not going with that one. With all of the idiosyncratic pronunciations, we'd have to slug our way through nearly every word! Have you read the original Lewis and Clark Journals? Clark didn't pronounce the same word the same way all of the time! It's fun, but not for everything I read. Of course, the god could decide on the standard pronunciation, but it might be more like "try to decide" than "decide".
Edith Wollin
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Miller, Robert
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2009 1:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: If I were the language god...
Without a doubt, fonetik spelling :)
Bob Miller
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Wollin, Edith
Sent: Mon 8/17/2009 3:22 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: If I were the language god...
I would not lose the pronoun for "we two"; I don't remember what it was
anymore, but I loved it. It feels so intimate and separates we two from
all of the "other" we's. There are also times when it would clear up
confusion. I can't quite figure out why we let it drop.
Edith Wollin
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dick Veit
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2009 10:40 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: If I were the language god...
As grammarians, we try to examine, understand, explain, and teach about
the English language as we find it. In rare unguarded moments, however,
in the privacy of our studies, some of us might indulge ourselves in
prescriptivist fantasies about how we would change our language if we
had that supernatural power. In these waning days of summer break,
perhaps some ATEGers might care to join me in such illicit speculation.
If you were the language god and could go back a thousand years to
reshape the evolution of the English language, what might you change?
Syntax, phonology, orthography, and punctuation are all fair game.
Of course our first thoughts might be to regularize the irregular. Get
rid of all the oddball verb inflections and make it: we seeked, we
taked, we swimmed, we goed, we doed, we beed. In spelling, the
absurdities to clean up are legion: there's tough/cough/bough/dough and
threw/through/coup/flew/slough/who/shoe, as well as limitless more
orthographic craziness
<http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php> . In punctuation,
we might want to put the comma and period after the close-quote mark
where they logically belong: You say "bucket", but I say "pail".
But that's all tame stuff. Anything more radical?
I think I'd change it so that plural and possesive nouns had different
inflections. Currently dogs, dog's, and dogs'' sound exactly alike. I'll
decree that the new plural inflection is -en, so that plurals are now
doggen, catten, horsen, oxen, and grammarianen. Now it's easy to
distinguish between doggen, dog's, and doggen's. In fact, the
apostrophes are now superfluous, so doggen, dogs, and doggens. Much
better.
So what would you change if you were the language god?
Dick Veit
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