What would you like to change about the English language?

In My Humble Opinion
21

We need a word where you can answer yes to a negatively phrased question.

“Aren’t you going?”
“Yes, I am not going.” or “No, I am going.” or “Yes, I am going.” Gets confusing.

But I also think English would be a richer language if we had some less specific ways of phrasing things, more all-encompassing terms, more ways of looking at the overall picture of something, instead of adding a multitude of very specific vocabulary words. We have, for example, a few dozen words for various types of bread but not a single word that encompasses the essence of breadness or the core, fundamental notion of breaditude. English is a very specific and technical language, or so it seems to me; but because it is, we frequently get tangled up over terms because we argue over the degree of precision required. The specificity of our language does not prepare our minds to accept concepts like breaditude or chair-ativity. So more words like Zeitgeist, please. :slight_smile:

FISH

22

We need a plural for ‘you’ that works in formal language (I love my ‘y’all,’ and use it in the north despite the funny looks.)

We need a gender-neutral personal pronoun.

I’d like to see English reduce the number of insult-words based on race, gender, and assorted other natural conditions. No matter how obscure your origins, English offers a slur on them, and I’m not sure we need them all. Let’s replace them with an all-purpose “I don’t like you, because I’m stupid” slur. I propose that ‘nigger,’ ‘chink,’ ‘spic,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘cracker,’ and ‘fag’ should be replaced with the all-purpose acronym ‘idlybis.’

23

The most annoying thing about the English language would have to be the inconsistencies in the actual spelling “rules” and their soounds. For example, using “ee” in words such as “seen” but also “ea” for the same sound eg “lean”.

Also the "I before E except after “C” rule. How ridiculous is that?

Another thing I don’t understand the importance of is why there always HAS to be the letter “U” following “Q” ? I think “Q words” sound just the same without the unnecessary “U” following closely behind.

Then we can get into the crazy “silent letters” - knife, knee, psychology, etc etc … Phonetic spelling makes perfectly good sense to me.

24

I hate all of those exceptions to pretty much every rule in the english language. I would also love to see pretty much everything that’s been mentioned so far, but I won’t bother repeating all of it.

25

We love you too.

26

I think English could go with a few new widely-accepted words, myself:
[ul]
[li]mu as a convenient way to negate the question. (In Japanese it just means no, but in hackish it’s acquired the more complex sense.)[/li][li]ir as a gender-neutral pronoun.[/li][li]y’all as a second-person plural. y’all’s would be a second-person plural possessive.[/li][li]libre to mean free from restrictions', to divorce that notion from the other sense of free of cost’. gratis to mean `free of cost’ more explicitly. (For example, “Speech in America is libre, but it is not gratis.”)[/li][/ul]Would I reform orthography? It’s know youse: We’ve accreted a system that’s more or less beyond fixing, short of dumping everything and beginning again. To make English spelling oll korrekt would imply that we’d dump everything now written, or we’d need to translate it. Besides, which pronunciation system would we settle around? Should we write it gurl, gel, jel, or gill? What if each (ostensibly) English-speaking nation chose different a different orthography?

Besides, English orthography has its roots in the history of the language. By altering spelling, we’d lose an interesting link to our own history.

27

I want English to dip back into it’s Germanic and Romantic wellspring. Bring back gendered nouns and their corresponding articles- Masculine, Feminine, and Neutral. I imagine that would give a specificity and certain dimension to all those “its”. Hmmm… what would “the’s” three gender forms take and how would we decide upon the gender of Nouns?

theg Moon (m)
throp Sun (f)
thol ladybug (n)

Anyone have agop betterop suggestion for “the”?

28

We need a word to mean people who have the role of uncle or aunt, but aren’t actually related. A lot of cultures just call them an uncle/aunt, and we did too when I was growing up, but it’s confusing and could be solved with another pair of words.

29

I would really like a set of words to denote a special relationship to parents that are not your own. For example, my best friend’s parents. I love these folks like they are my family, but it doesn’t seem right to call them “Maxine and Bill”, their first names, because they are so much older than me and I have respect for them that makes that sort of familiarity uncomfortable. (First names are more of a peer thing, IMHO.) Yet calling them “Mr and Mrs BestFriendParent” is far too formal and removed for these dear, dear people. A special title would be valuable in this situation, and also useable for in-laws or step-parents.

30

The word right should only be ONE of the following:
a) synonym of “correct”
b) opposite of “left”

It should not be both.

31

I think that “funner” and “funnest” should be recognized as real words!

I would also like to see some new punctuation marks so that we can reduce the number of uses for commas. Fewer possible uses should lead to fewer possible mistakes.

32

The prohibition against using “they” as a singular pronoun only dates from the late 18th century.

http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html#X1a

It does not, in fact, break any legitimate rules, and is not in the least ungrammatical. Granted, it doesn’t suit every situation for which we might need a genderless pronoun, but it’s not against the rules, and if it grates it’s because of excessive pedantry, not a conflict with the proper use of the English language.

33

I don’t like words that seem to have gotten their pronounciation by people reading them like omnipotent and enveloped. Those words should sound like their roots.

34

I’d settle for some continuity on that one. You forgot the whole, convoluted rule: I before E except after C and in the specific cases of their, weird and a half a dozen other f**ked up instances.

I love the ideas of a gender neutral pronoun and title of respect.

Mu is cool. Consider it adopted by yours truly. I can’t wait to pull it on my logic professor (in an example, of course, he would never ask a flawed question. Not Professor, Doctor Bates, sir. :wink: )

35

Could someone please provide a good definition of “mu?” Does it simply mean, “your question cannot be answered” or what?

36

In one of the other language threads, the I-before-E thing was clarified:

I before E,
except after C,
when the sound is ‘ee’. :slight_smile:

[sub]Except when the word is ''leisure". Bloody exceptions.[/sub]

For a good set of gender-neutral singular third-person pronouns, just chop the ‘th’ off the third-person plurals: ey, eir, em, eirself… That’s what I use.

Second-person plural pronoun (“y’all”) is good too. We’ll regularise it as ‘yall’ without the apostrophe.

‘Mu’ is good.

‘Gratis’ versus ‘libre’ is good. And what with the current uproar in the computer and business worlds over ‘open-source software’, I think the time is right for using these. We can’t keep saying “Free as in speech, not as in beer” forever…

We should either:
a) bring back the Anglo-Saxon letters for voiced ‘th’ (thorn), and unvoiced ‘th’ (eth), or
b) spell voiced ‘th’ as ‘dh’: ‘dhy’ instead of ‘thy’.

Likewise, we should use ‘zh’ in English words as well.

I disagree with ratty; I think we should have fewer inflections and stick with one word order. All werbs would be conjugated the same for case and number.

Heck, we don’t even need plurals! We can just add a number or a word like ‘many’ to the noun to specify number when it is needed.

If that means we end up saying things like ‘It beed cold and beed snowing when I seed three car slide into the ditch’, so be it. :slight_smile: English is heading in that direction anyway. We’ll just be a little ahead of the curve.

But the most important thing to be done to improve English?

Fix the &^ŝ@$$ spelling!
Use Shavian if you have to. But fix it!!! Everything else is details.

37

y’all’s is an abomination. :slight_smile: I think their’s works just as well.
Oh, and let’s solve it once and for all. I before E, period.

38

I agree, and would also like to bring back inflections and devil-may-care word order.

39

I want the equivalent of “mullato” for all race combinations and I want all punctuation outside the fucking quotation marks. Come to think of it, I also want a puncuation mark that indicates a statement was intended to be ironic.

40

In an effort to make spelling fix itself, I think that we should drop some letters from the alphabet.

X could go if we replaced it with “ks” (eg maksimum) or “z” (eg zylophone).

C could probably go if we replaced it with “k” (eg kaution) or “s” (eg plasemat)

With a bit of effort we could probably get it down to 18-20 letters, which would provide less alternatives for spelling, and therefore less chance to get things wrong.

Dave T