The German language is ironically one of the weirder Germanic languages. When I say North Germanic languages I mostly mean what is now known as Scandinavian languages (and sometimes Dutch depending on who you ask).
I think they’ve been on the ball with spelling reforms as the language has evolved. The last one as recently as in 1996. English has no central authority for spelling, making such reforms much harder to implement. Conservatives are of course, like always, a problem. Being against any and all spelling reform. The main argument seem to be that it makes it harder for people to read really old texts in their original form. Which for some reason makes spelling and speach drifting apart worth it. I known Swedish conservative pseudo-intellectuals often praise the English for it’s lack of reform.
Funny you mention Germanic languages, given how deterministic German itself is on pronunciation of letters.
The German language is ironically one of the weirder Germanic languages. When I say North Germanic languages I mostly mean what is now known as Scandinavian languages (and sometimes Dutch depending on who you ask).
Gotcha. I wish more languages were like German in their adherence to letter-phoneme pairing.
I think they’ve been on the ball with spelling reforms as the language has evolved. The last one as recently as in 1996. English has no central authority for spelling, making such reforms much harder to implement. Conservatives are of course, like always, a problem. Being against any and all spelling reform. The main argument seem to be that it makes it harder for people to read really old texts in their original form. Which for some reason makes spelling and speach drifting apart worth it. I known Swedish conservative pseudo-intellectuals often praise the English for it’s lack of reform.
Besides, they say ‘read really old texts’ as if this is easily achieved right now, which it is not