luke wrote:I'm thinking the quality of the language revisions matters. The Spanish seemed to have been very smart in writing reforms.
Well there's certainly a considerable difference between standardising orthographic conventions and standardising the whole language. In principle I'm not against spelling reforms if well thought out, and I think a lot of languages suffer for having historical hangovers that are kept in place simply because the words were pronounced differently when they were first written down.
Ironically, though, English is the language that suffers most from anachronistic spellings, and precisely because of the lack of a standardising body: the Oxford dictionary was always a descriptive document, and the dictionary didn't attempt to standardise regional variation, so words are written with very different dialectal roots and different local orthographies, and teachers and editors didn't understand this.
In practice, there's a similar problem of the misunderstanding of what orthographic reforms are. The rules in the Scottish Gaelic Orthographic Conventions relate purely to spelling, and yet a great many people believe they're more than that, and invented prescriptions are incorrectly ascribed to the standard.
Myself, when a peer writes "tho" for "though" and I know they aren't misspelling it from ignorance, but rather an attempt at innovation, they lose me.
I don't do it myself, but in principle I really can't see a problem with it. It's what the language would prefer if we weren't actively preventing it from evolving.
And let's not mention the chasm that's grown between the enlightened who know that a sentence ends with two spaces and the others who imagine spaces are in short supply and they are helping to save the planet by conserving spaces.
Or the chasm between those who believe a sentence ends with two spaces and those that know that the traditional typesetting convention was for a space and a half after a period and that two spaces was simply the best approximation that could be managed by a manual typewriter, and that modern wordprocessors automatically increase the space after a period, leaving the document author with no need to manually insert any additional space.