I used to spend a lot of time on r/linguisticshumor, doing what every grown-up on Reddit inevitably does. (That is, disagreeing with everything, but smugly.) Recently I got it into my head that shouting at the never-ebbing tide of first-year linguistics students was a waste of my life, so rather than continue piling bricks in an ever-eroding wall, I'll just post them here, and you can throw them through your own window (or your enemies' windows) at your leisure.
Proposition 1: A mature written language is a diglossia, not a transcript of spoken language. Because of the absence of pragmatics (tones, hand gestures, emphasis, pauses, etc.), written language is not as expressive as spoken language, so good writers necessarily lean on other conventions that might be cumbersome when spoken. Over time this is aggravated by innovation in both varieties.
Proposition 2: Widespread literacy anchors a language, slowing phonological changes and grammatical innovation. The larger the written corpus, the higher the penalty for deviating from it, as speakers encounter difficulty in accessing the established works.
Proposition 3: Redundancies are good when they occur in grammar—e.g. agreement in gender, person, and number has survived in many European languages because they lower the information density of a sentence and decrease the chance of missing a detail.
Proposition 4: Redundancies in orthography should also be embraced. A spelling system that distinguishes between homophones is better than a direct transcription, as it can be used to disambiguate them. Even two different ways of spelling a single sound can be useful because they can serve as error-correcting codes in case of damage (e.g. "j?m" might be "jim" or "jam", but not "gym" or "gem") by adding gaps in the domain of all legal lemmas. Conversely, homographs with different pronunciations give spoken language the upper hand.
Proposition 5: Awareness of the diglossia between written and spoken language is intrinsically good. This usually manifests when the student encounters difficulties in the orthography for the first time. There are obviously points where the bad outweighs the good (e.g. one might pity a mediaeval monk learning written Latin when they speak Old French, ignorant of the differences) but the bare minimum amount of friction, if presented right, illuminates the student to the concepts of "correct" spelling and teaches them to value written language as its own entity, which is advisable in a world where written language exists on its own terms (see Prop 2.)
Therefore:
Polemic 1: English spelling will never significantly change.
Polemic 2: Spelling reform is just as severe and daunting a proposition as pronunciation reform. (Why don't you just go propose a pronunciation reform, hotshot?)
Polemic 3: Spoken English will still be recognizable in ten thousand years. (See also: mutual intelligibility of modern spoken Ecclesiastical Latin with spoken Classical Latin; evolutionary slowdown in English since the Great Vowel Shift.)
Proposition 1: A mature written language is a diglossia, not a transcript of spoken language. Because of the absence of pragmatics (tones, hand gestures, emphasis, pauses, etc.), written language is not as expressive as spoken language, so good writers necessarily lean on other conventions that might be cumbersome when spoken. Over time this is aggravated by innovation in both varieties.
Proposition 2: Widespread literacy anchors a language, slowing phonological changes and grammatical innovation. The larger the written corpus, the higher the penalty for deviating from it, as speakers encounter difficulty in accessing the established works.
Proposition 3: Redundancies are good when they occur in grammar—e.g. agreement in gender, person, and number has survived in many European languages because they lower the information density of a sentence and decrease the chance of missing a detail.
Proposition 4: Redundancies in orthography should also be embraced. A spelling system that distinguishes between homophones is better than a direct transcription, as it can be used to disambiguate them. Even two different ways of spelling a single sound can be useful because they can serve as error-correcting codes in case of damage (e.g. "j?m" might be "jim" or "jam", but not "gym" or "gem") by adding gaps in the domain of all legal lemmas. Conversely, homographs with different pronunciations give spoken language the upper hand.
Proposition 5: Awareness of the diglossia between written and spoken language is intrinsically good. This usually manifests when the student encounters difficulties in the orthography for the first time. There are obviously points where the bad outweighs the good (e.g. one might pity a mediaeval monk learning written Latin when they speak Old French, ignorant of the differences) but the bare minimum amount of friction, if presented right, illuminates the student to the concepts of "correct" spelling and teaches them to value written language as its own entity, which is advisable in a world where written language exists on its own terms (see Prop 2.)
Therefore:
Polemic 1: English spelling will never significantly change.
Polemic 2: Spelling reform is just as severe and daunting a proposition as pronunciation reform. (Why don't you just go propose a pronunciation reform, hotshot?)
Polemic 3: Spoken English will still be recognizable in ten thousand years. (See also: mutual intelligibility of modern spoken Ecclesiastical Latin with spoken Classical Latin; evolutionary slowdown in English since the Great Vowel Shift.)
