The sort of nonsense up with which I will not put

[nineveh_uk]

While there may be disadvantages to the lack of any central body with responsibility for English As She Is Spoke*, there is a decided plus side, which is that no-one can come along and say "We've decided that [word] is spelt differently now" or "we've re-written all the rules about commas."** There is something to be said for the free and easy approach of owning a copy of Fowler in order to argue why you choose to ignore it against the alternative approach, which might be epitomised**** by the following extract from Wikipedia, brought to you by looking up further my German teacher's comments on whether to write du or Du:

In der Schriftsprache werden das Pronomen „Sie“ und die davon abgeleiteten Formen großgeschrieben. Bis zur Rechtschreibreform 1996 gab es auch eine Höflichkeitsform für „Du“ in der Schriftsprache, in der dieses Wort großgeschrieben wurde. Von 1996 bis 2006 wurde „du“ in neuer Rechtschreibung ausschließlich kleingeschrieben. Seit der neuesten, inzwischen vierten Revision der Rechtschreibreform kann „Du“ bei persönlicher Anrede wieder großgeschrieben werden.

Google translate does it for us. Only the culture that produced Nietzsche could produce a sentence like 'Since the latest, now the fourth revision of the spelling reform'. One can just hear the existential despair that rolls off it.

*Would that there had been a committee in 1400 or so to consider whether the Great Vowel Shift should be allowed. Also, I would vote for re-introducing "æ".

**Danish, which I see has since managed to change the comma rules that were new when I learnt*** them.

***Or should that be learned? I think I can choose.

**** The English version is epitomised by the fact that I can choose not to write epitomized. Of course, English is nothing in comparison to Norwegian, in which it would probably be entirely correct to write epyttomised as long as you came from the particular valley in which that was correct and all your other spelling matched it.

Comments

[azdak]

Well, quite! "Does" is another bastard. And just doing the numbers from one to ten provides lots of opportunities to demonstrate how weird English spelling is. I would feel very disorientated if "one" had to be spelled "wun" because of a spelling reform, but it would make life so much easier for the next generation of readers, I'd be willing to take wun for the team.

[nineveh_uk]

*groans* Though I would rather take "wan" for the team, not least because it would be better to allow the continuance of one of my father's particularly annoying jokes, "pale and two".

[antisoppist]

Is that Birmingham? One of my mother's idiosyncratic pronunciations compared to the rest of us (Estuary) is the vowel in "1".

[nineveh_uk]

Well they are both Birmingham. Is it a Birmingham thing? I definitely pronounce wan and one to rhyme (more or less), rather than one and won. I now feel the need to go round asking people to count to five to hear how they say it.

[antisoppist]

I now feel the need to go round asking people to count to five to hear how they say it
I feel this could be your mission for the day. It would endear you to your colleagues no end.

Perhaps it's a north of Watford thing. I don't know. I pronounce one and won the same, not one and wan but I'm Essex (and have glottal l's)*. Mum's parents moved to run a guesthouse in Lowestoft when she was in primary school, and then moved to Southend but she's got residual bits of original West Midlands.

*A distant cousin once produced a Swedish boyfriend called Ulf and we spent an entertaining afternoon trying to get an elderly Essex great aunt to be able to pronounce his name as anything other than "Oof"

[nineveh_uk]

I may have to do a poll!

[perennialanna]

I say one and won the same, and I am mostly Surrey Girl (with a few Cornish dialect words in my mother's 1950s Grammar School).