Which touches on the one enormous advantage of having one official reference. I think it was Martini Enfield who was extatic at the thought of having a single “style guide” (the Ortografía) which anybody can access and is supposed to follow, with specific publications only needing to add one or two pages with their own idiosyncrasies.
I don’t think any given language “needs” an Academy or 20, but your paragraph there boils down to “it’s much better to have a dozen different references which disagree constantly than to have a single one everybody agrees on.”
I think we do just fine with the various “style guides” that major publications like the NYT uses. AFAIK, anyone can access that if they wish. And that would be the “singular they”, which I’ve grown to love recently.
it would staunch the increasing degradation of the language and literally save it.
surely the SDMB would have one of it’s moderators on the language board grammer errors and spelling would be instabanned. The quality of this board will increase literally exponentially.
Or as I would put it: British English is different from American English which is different from the English spoken in one of the other countries on five continents where English is a de jure or de facto official language.
Same problem with spelling reform. Whose spelling? Whose pronunciation?
Anyway, these academies remind me of King Canute trying to stop the waves. Actually, my claims the good king was simply trying to illustrate that there were things even the king could not do and got a bad rap.
Plus the Academia is such a convenient whipping boy about how the accepted usage fails to comply with our particular would-be standard of correctness! We can say it’s because they are reactionary old farts, not because our proposed style sounds daft!
Maybe there shouldn’t be such a language board for English but could we pass a Constitutional amendment or something to take care of the whole “lose”, “loose” travesty? I’d be happy.
As far as I know any languages in recent history that have been controlled by a language board, are spoken in only one country (Turkiish, Norwegian, Romanian, etc.).
German recently went through a spelling change, and it was widely ignored by a lot of publishers, and as I recall, Austria ignored it completely. The Swiss already speak a language that Germans believe is intended to infuriate them. French is the notorious example of dictionary inclusions being bound by the famous Academie, but the French went ahead and shopped at le drugstore anyway. I think Quebec considers itself pretty autonomous, linguistically. Académie française does not pretend to have any authority outside France, and any nation that has French as an official language is free to adopt any form of French they like.
Plus how are you sure they wouldn’t be as ridiculously nitpicky as the 18th century grammatarians who saddled us with “no prepositions at the end of sentences”, “don’t split infinitives”, or worst of all "no singular ‘they’ (it’s highly pratical and is used both by Shakespeare and the King James Bible, but dammit it wasn’t good enough for your high school English teacher)? Also, not only are the Academie losing the war against English and Franglish, but with computer terms and social media they’re losing it faster than ever. English is the clear winner of the language wars, its usage gaining every day. Why saddle yourself with the outdated idea of a language academy if there’s no real gains to be made.
Dr Samuel Johnson - the creator of the first serious English Dictionary - put the case against language academies very clearly in the Preface to his Dictionary in 1755.
Nobody has said it better:
Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, require that it
should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and
chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With
this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but
now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor
experience can justify. When we see men grow old and die at a certain time
one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that
promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may
the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a
nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall
imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from
corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature,
or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.
With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the
avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but
their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too
volatile and subtle for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to
lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure
its desires by its strength. The French language has visibly changed under
the inspection of the academy; the style of Amelot’s translation of father
Paul is observed by Le Courayer to be un peu passè; and no Italian will
maintain, that the diction of any modern writer is not perceptibly
different from that of Boccace, Machiavel, or Caro.
Total and sudden transformations of a language seldom happen; conquests
and migrations are now very rare: but there are other causes of change,
which, though slow in their operation, and invisible in their progress, are
perhaps as much superior to human resistance, as the revolutions of the
sky, or intumescence of the tide.
I think we should have an academy. Not to police the language, but to publish reference works. An online encyclopedia with Wikipedia’s breadth, and Britannica’s scholarship. Project Gutenberg-style texts of the Great Literary Classics. (Yes, I know, there are a lot of e-books available already, but the editing is often rather shoddy.)
Oh, and when Congress opens a session, or a president is inaugurated, they should attend the ceremony, wearing l’habit vert.
Even if such a board existed, what could they do that would genuinely affect everyday speech?
Over time, words and phrases enter the English language naturally and organically, and no official pronouncements from a body of English professors can stop that.
