I would never teach anyone English in its present form.
Y Eye Wood Neva Teech Any1 Inglish
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There is the famous Bernard Shaw observation:
GHOTI = FISH
photograPH - F
wOmen - I
naTIon - SH
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http://www.spellingsociety.org/
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English is well on the way to becoming a de facto global lingua franca, a global language.
It has many advantages that make it a good choice to be a global language.
It also has some defects in its present form that make it a bad choice as a world language.
It's becoming a world language may be to the detriment of other languages but that is not inevitable.
However, if it is to be an international language I think that it should
most definitely have logical spelling.
If it is possible for a language, especially a world language, to have logical spelling then it
should have it.
In some ways I don't think of English as being a distinct language, though of course it undoubtedly is. It has various origins and various versions.
It has various origins and has borrowed many words, but so have other languages.
Most languages evolved from other languages.
It is not as "clean" and "pure" a language as some other languages are.
I mean that in a purely linguistic sense. This is due to the mixture of influences on the language.
Joseph Conrad, who chose to write in English - his fourth language -, said something similar about English. He thought that French may have been a clearer language to write in.
(I must find a quote to validate that point about Conrad.)
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On the other hand it is capable of many shades of meaning, perhaps because of its varied origins.
English is about 300 years old in its present form. It is constantly evolving as are all human languages. But English is evolving more than others because it is spoken all over the planet. This makes it quite heterodox.
...
There is a great amount of excellent literature in English. It is worth learning just for that but I would not teach it in its present form because it does not at present have logical spelling.
Some people may want to learn the spelling to read the literature but there is no literary value to the spellings in themselves in my opinion.
I won't teach anyone a language with illogical spelling.
Just doesn't make sense to me.
I would go as far as to say that a language without generally logical spelling is not really a language.
The same applies to Gaelic. I think it should have logical spelling as well.
The irony is that all English spellings were attempts at logical spellings.
The spellings were only standardised in the 18th century, I think.
I read Bill Bryson's excellent book "Mother Tongue" about the English language, and in it he reveals that there was even a mediaeval monk in the early thirteenth century - named Orm - who demanded logical, phonetic spelling for English.
The beginnings of modern English were in the medieval period, around the time of the writer Chaucer, who wrote in what is called Middle English.
At its birth it was a mixture of Anglo-Saxon or Old English and French and this is one reason for the erratic spelling.
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8th August 2008.
There is talk of a "spelling amnesty" - allowing some words to be spelt differently from normal.
The irony is still lost on most people: all English spellings were originally attempts at logical spellings; and there were no spelling rules at all until about the 18th century.
Before that time anyone could spell anything any way they liked.
These facts are not often reported in the coverage of this issue.
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Other things in favour of English as a global language:
Flexible and simple grammar
No word genders at all
No declensions/endings - i.e. it is analytic.
Easy verb tenses
Things against:
Far too many homophones and homonyms
Some difficult verb participles
All in all - much more in favour than against!...
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