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4 Noble (Yet Goofy) Attempts To Make The English Language Less Of A Trainwreck  

As you know, I'm a sucker for linguistics articles, whether they come from comedy sites or otherwise.

The English language was invented by a collection of hairy men with poorly healed axe wounds to the head, then refined by a bunch of guys in bad wigs who drank a pint of mercury every morning to treat their syphilis. It was spelled entirely at random until the late 1500s, when the earliest attempts at standardized spelling were made, largely out of spite.

A fair summary, even if it leaves out the influences of French and alcohol.

Since then, English has grown to become the second most widely spoken language in the world, but some of the most famous names in history have found themselves inexplicably unhappy with the language's rigorous development process and have proposed reforming English spelling.

Are you kidding? If we ever reformed English spelling, it would be that much harder to tell educated people apart from idiots.

4. Ben Franklin Tried To Get Rid Of The Letter 'C'

Ben Franklin was probably the coolest founding father, spending approximately half his time humiliating his enemies and the other half plowing his way across Europe. But every jock has a boring side and Franklin was a passionate advocate of spelling form. Specifically, Franklin wanted to introduce a more phonetic alphabet, where letters correspond directly to spoken sounds.

In modern English, letters can be pronounced wildly differently depending on context. For example, in "Pacific Ocean" the first C is pronounced like you're sexually harassing a snake, the second C should sound like you're choking on an aspirin, and the third C is pronounced like a slowly deflating air mattress around 3 AM.

Mostly I'm just leaving this here because it's funny.

To replace the lost letters, Franklin proposed six new ones to represent sounds like the "-ng" in "running" and "jumping," or the "sh" in "action."

Apparently no one told him that one of the languages related to English already had an 'ng' letter. Unlike the 'th' letter, though, I can't find it in the ASCII symbol list. But here it is.  

In any case, I find it hilarious that the guy who wanted to eliminate the letter C ended up on the C-note.

3. Noah Webster Wanted To Change How We Reed And Rite

Webster was a huge advocate of spelling reform and is best remembered today for his war on U, which he considered an unseemly letter that had no business sneaking up on a gentleman in the middle of a perfectly reasonable word like "color" or "rumor." The English had tried to class up their language by adopting pseudo-French spellings for many words. Thanks to Webster, American spelling rejected this, replacing forms like "centre" and "plough" with the simpler "center" and "plow."

So, you know, just in case you were wondering why we spell some words differently, blame Webster.

2. Teddy Roosevelt Ordered The Entire Government To Use "Simplified Spelling"

By the late 19th century, spelling reform had become a trendy issue in high society. Even Mormon leader Brigham Young was touting his own phonetic "Deseret Alphabet," which was generally incomprehensible to even devout Mormons, but got slapped on every street sign in Utah anyway.

If my name were Brigham, I'd want to change spelling also.

In fact, all words ending -ed were supposed to end with -t instead, turning "snapped" into "snapt" and "passed" into "past." Needless to say, traditionalists were pist.

Snort.

The British papers quipped "Karnegi and President Rusvelt are doing ther best to ad to the gaiety of nations (or nashuns)," while an American journalist declared that "Nuthing escapes Mr. Rucevelt. No subject is tu hi fr him to takl, nor tu lo for him tu notis. He makes tretis without the consent of the Senit. He inforces such laws as meet his approval, and fales to se those that do not soot him. He now assales the English langgwidg."

Pretty sure I've gotten similar texts.

1. George Bernard Shaw And The Shavian Alphabet

For example, Shaw declared that apostrophes were useless and removed them from contractions like don't and musn't in his writing. But he was forced to keep using an apostrophe in I'll to avoid confusion with ill. So now there was an apostrophe in some contractions but not in others. It was an apostrophe catastrophe!

Fun Fact: "apostrophe" and "catastrophe" are spelled exactly the same way in French with the same meanings - but are pronounced like APP-uh-strof and CAT-uh-strof.

In any case, it's worth reading the whole article. Usual disclaimer: Cracked doesn't exactly put a lot of time into fact-checking, so don't assume it's absolutely factual, especially the funny bits.

I've often wondered exactly how it is that, with all of its borrowings, inconsistencies, and ambiguities, English became the default international language. I mean, yes, sure, British colonialism, but that can't be the whole story. It's almost as if the entire world said, "Hey, here's a language that's really, really hard to learn, one that even native speakers often get wrong, and which has counterintuitive spelling / sound combinations like through, though, and tough. Let's make sure to use it to communicate with other people!"

Almost every spelling/pronunciation mismatch in English has a reason. This word came from proto-German; that one came from Latin by way of French; this other one was originally Hebrew, which uses an entirely different alphabet. But here's the thing: when using a language that is both spoken and written, it's incredibly annoying to have to learn different pronunciation rules for the same letter combination, as with the examples in the previous paragraph. You almost have to learn each word individually. I remember as a kid learning to read, they'd always tell me when I hit an unfamiliar word: "Sound it out." But then I'd sound it out and it'd be like "No, no, that 'gh' sounds like 'f'. And 'cough' doesn't sound like 'tough.'" Gah!

This was before Hukt On Fonix, which I know nothing about except that it exists.

But there is one thing about the vagaries of English: it's an opportunity to display one's superiority. I know how to spell, punctuate, apostrophize, and (usually) pronounce English. Not that I never make mistakes, of course, but I take great pleasure in demonstrating my grasp of English words and sentence structure.

Elitist? Yes, absolutely. I can live with that.

Still, the egalitarian in me still thinks language reform would be a good thing. But at this point there's no way to impose it from above; it'll have to grow organically, the way most language evolves over time. And hypocritically, when it does, I sneer at the new spellings, abbreviations, and words because whoever came up with them is clearly an idiot.