Fixing the Problems in the English Language

In other words you want fiction to sound like a manual*

"To me, as long as there is something I can improve, I will seek to improve it."

Thing is, I don't think you can improve English. The few things which might currently be issues are already being worked on through the evolution of language. Your main objective complaint seems to be ambiguity; words are generally not ambiguous in context and if they are, we have solved that by having the phrase "What do you mean?".

One man cannot thoroughly change a language. He can add words to it, and apply small changes through those words, but he cannot change the whole thing.

And why, exactly, do you consider English to be inefficient the way it is now, when so many people use it just fine, and some enjoy playing with it?

Language is a way of expressing your thoughts. Anything that makes language line up more with your thoughts is improving language.

...No. I didn't say that was a bad thing. That is something that isn't improving the efficiency or clarity of ones speech, so it was evidence against the claim that all change is done to improve the efficiency and clarity of ones speech.

I can certainly try to, though, and that is all this is. My attempt at improving the English language.

It has many parts that are governed by inefficient rules. However, it's inefficiency isn't the primary reason of fixing it.

Also, many people enjoy it so much more than me because they value different things in a language than I do.

I don't understand what you mean here.

In general, I don't understand why you view ambiguity as such a terrible thing. Ambiguity is part of human communication, which extends beyond what two people on the internet might use to talk to each other on a forum (which isn't to say that ambiguity is always negative in this situation). Communication encompasses creative writing, humour, irony, tone, metaphor, poetry, the manifold connotations all words have - all these can contain ambiguity or use it to create their effects. I can give you example after example of works in which ambiguity is used as a tool. By getting rid of ambiguity in this extremely specific way, you're not making it easier to communicate - you're ridding the English language of a valuable technique.

...and a reason why the English language has been so successful.

...To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what I meant there either...

It may be a part of human communication, but I don't see how it is a necessary part. I see it as a bad thing because it results in ideas being expressed that aren't matching up with the thought behind them with perfect precision, which is something I view as a bad thing.

...I'd attribute that to how the English language goes om-nom-nom to other languages, incorporating parts of them into itself.

The reason why the English language has been successful is because of the British empire conquering a third of the world, followed by American hegemony.

That too.

On that part, I agree. I something really needed doing, we'd hear about it on the News! And it wouldn't*

edited 23rd Aug '12 5:41:55 AM by Greenmantle

THIS.

As much as I disagree with pigeon's idea that there is something particularly wrong with the english language, it is not a particularly great language either, it isn't successful because it convinced millions of people to learn it because it's such a practical language, but because of geopolitical reasons.

It isn't even the most popular language, that would be Mandarin with twice the speakers.

Every language has ambiguity, every language has loanwords and other ways of incorporating terms from foreign languages, every language has it's own subtleties and poetic beauty. Claiming anything else, that some living, actively used languages are outright better than others, would just play into the hands of pigeon's pseudo-linguistic theory that some languages could be actively improved.

edited 23rd Aug '12 5:45:27 AM by Ever9

That would be because China has so many people.

And I have a problem with the ambiguity in every language. I have no problem, though, with loanwords, as long as they are fully incorporated into the grammar of the language.

Also, I agree that no language is objectively better. To me, though, there are languages that are better and worse than other languages.

For what it's worth, I don't consider there to be that many problems with any given language.

An equally valid way to fix English's non-phonetic writing system is to go the Chinese way and make each word into its own character. Cantonese and Mandarin can manage to stay cohesive because, despite having completely different pronunciations, they both use the same character.

edited 23rd Aug '12 5:53:32 AM by ohsointocats

While, on the other hand, I consider all languages to have problems. Even my improved English will have problems. I am wish I could get rid of them all, but the best I can do is reduce them in number.

...That would be an interesting way to structure English's writing...

edited 23rd Aug '12 5:55:19 AM by deathpigeon

Chinese people seem to like it. Then the only problem would be convincing everyone to learn over 400,000 graphemes and program computers to do the same.

Then be ready to fail miserably. A language doesn't change unless almost everybody changes the usage, and even so that process is usually very slow. It takes a big effort and a lot of influence to force a language to change suddenly (best example would be simplified Chinese, but that 1) required a totalitarian government to impose forcibly upon her people and 2) even then the places where the PRC has less people like Hong Kong people do not like it- Hong Kong call it the handicapped Chinese). Looking at the responses to your idea... Well, let's say that it's not exactly encouraging.

You might as well try to re-engineer and rationalize people's emotions. Neither language nor emotion is supposed to be rational. Language is an organic outgrowth of our culture and psyches (though with a considerable amount of reciprocal feedback). Learned opinion can sometimes limit, direct, or sharpen its powers of expression, but that's kind of like trimming a shrub. What you're proposing is more like turning a rhododendron into a Lego sculpture.

Most damaging is this cockeyed notion of erasing ambiguity: the polyvalency of English words is at the heart of its literature. You can scarcely go a half-dozen lines in a Shakespeare play without encountering an expression that is great because the ambiguity of English allows the Bard to say/suggest two, three, or more things at once. How does one translate Faulkner or Joyce into this "rationalized" lingo?

This whole undertaking is akin to substituting food pills for food: theoretically doable to some extent, and attractive to the occasional crank, but self-evidently ridiculous to anyone with a fully human, non-reductive understanding of what food and language are for.

Ira's got a good point.

Making a language evolve from a phonographic orthography to a logographic orthography would be prohibitively difficult in the particular case of English. As others have pointed out, this is due in no small part to the English language's imperialistic and colonial history.

When I was finishing my degree in linguistics, we had a little role-playing project in which one person would make a new language from an existing one. Kind of a "model nations" sort of thing. It sounded easy at first, but when we considered elements such as identity politics, cultural appropriation, the evolution of syntactic structures, the impact wars have on language evolution, etc., we quickly learned that there was a whole mess of problems to be found in doing so. Others on this forum have already pointed out several of those problems. English has a particular history that has shaped its current usage, and that usage goes far beyond mere outlining of rules of syntax, lexicography and phonetics.

The Norman conquest of England, the Great Vowel Shift, the Black Plague, the fall of the Roman Empire and the Restoration Period are just a few of the major historical elements that changed English in ways that couldn't have been predicted by just saying "we're all going to speak it this way from now on." You also have to consider the fact that many members of the laity of the Middle Ages were illiterate, and with the church containing most of the literate and educated, the Christian influence on English is extremely significant, even today.

Prescriptive grammars and lexicons have their place in language evolution, but it stands to be said that languages survive and propagate not through artificial modifications prescribed by authority figures, but through simply being used by a large number of people. Exclusivity does not lend itself too well to the survival of a language, and many academics throughout human history have tried to re-standardize languages in vain. The times where artificial language prescription has been successful usually involved a very powerful person or very powerful minority of people telling the rest of the population that their culture, people and language would be under new management, if you catch my drift. Non-coercive means of language evolution that weren't more naturally occurring were and continue to be a monumental task, and it tends to do more harm than good to the survival of the language.

In any case, I recommend reading some of these resources:

Communicating Gender by Suzanne Romaine

Saving Languages by Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley

The Origins and Development of the English Language Sixth Edition by John Algeo (an absolute must-read if you're going to approach this from an academic standpoint)

What Writing Does and How It Does It edited by Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior

Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics by Alan Cruse

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics Fifth Edition, by Ronald Wardhaugh

American English Second Edition, by Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes

Discourse Analysis Second Edition, by Barbara Johnstone

Noam Chomsky has a few You Tube videos on the subject, as well.

Thread Hop: The main thing I'd like to see is something to distinguish the inclusive "we" from the exclusive one.

I think that's generally distinguishable by context, Grizzly. Like a whole lot of other words.

Referring to the previous page, how does making a language that hampers jokes and poetry make it easier to communicate with? If you're cutting down on the ways we can express an idea, or irony, or any other number of things, you're limiting the effectiveness of communication. Basically, the goals of this project are kind of dumb. And unnecessary.

Again, Cityfowl, what is your problem with ambiguity? Why are you so keen to avoid it?

From my point of view, English needs a spelling reform, but that's about it, and it's unlikely to get even that, since nobody's in charge of it.

I don't think you're going to be able to reach a point where someone's thoughts correlate exactly to what they're saying, because human thoughts are hard. You can't fix the difficulty of communicating with others by making language unambiguous, because people aren't unambiguous. The only way to fix the difficulty of communicating is by communicating more openly, learning to ask questions and say the right things, and so on.

The only time I can imagine that ambiguity in language is harmful to people is in romantic comedies where everything hinges on some massive understanding over a few lines. That doesn't happen in real life because people communicate like rational human beings and misunderstandings are easily resolved. Unless you're terrible at communicating.