When Spelling Reforms Work 

Let's take a look at your proposed reform... How should we treat vowels before consonant clusters? Let's at first assume they are short just like before double letters and therefore leave words like 'anger', 'limb', and 'cost' alone. But what about the long vowels in 'angel', 'climb', or 'host'? In order to maintain consistency, we have to spell all consonants before short vowels as double letters even when in clusters or at the end of a word. So we get 'annger', 'limmb', and 'cosst'. Hmmm. We'd also get absolute abominations like 'proppossittion', 'addammannt', and 'annimmossitty'. Or should I say 'abbomminnations'? And how are you supposed to maintain the intervocalic voicing of the 's' in 'proposition'? Regularising the use of single and double letters on its own doesn't solve the underlying issue of vowel length ambiguity in English orthography, all the while making writing a more arduous and space-inefficient task, as well as ironically making reading more difficult as well. Spelling reform proposal aside, your videos are excellent and you deserve more recognition.

As one of the 10 german speaking people in Belgium, I can tell you that we do use the new spelling. Whoever made the map/was the source for it, probably just forgot that we exist. Something you get used to after a while.

German here. The spelling reform happened when I was inbetween elementaroy and middle school. For me the new spelling rules where immediately understandable and way more predictable than the former spelling convention. That spelling reform was a very well thought out move.

As a German "devellopping" just looks like your typical high-school student spelling mistake. But oh how it would increase our grades in english :D

I've been told my spelling grades jumped up a lot in third grade, simply because my most common spelling mistakes were no longer wrong. New spelling is more consistent with the rules.

You're literally the only person who has been able to explain ß in such a way I can comprehend it properly. Thanks a lot!!

The joke I always say about English is that the spelling is so bad we literally have contests called “spelling bees” to see who can master English. The irony is that no one realizes how hard it is.

The German reform worked, in part, because it already had a regulated and reformed language to work on. The last German orthographic Reform had been less than 100 years earlier, culling most of the real harsh outliers that English still struggles with, but not even the vowel shift shit, which German just never spelled out like english anyway. Also, German reforms have a lot less trouble getting hold since they mainly concern Germany and than allow Austria and Switzerland - who already have their own slightly different rules - to adapt. In contrast, english Reforms need to be heard in England, the US, Canada, Australia and more.

One thing to mention: Switzerland doesn‘t use the ß at all. We allways write „ss“ instead. So here people already wrote „dass“ before 1996. For most situations it goes absolutely fine. Only for „Massen“ and „Maßen“ and „Busse“ and „Buße“ it could lead to missunderstandings.

The other successful spelling reform is Malay and Indonesian in 1972. We manage to change the mess of different spelling from the two standards, like the word "Chuchu" and "Tjutju" into "Cucu" (means grandchild). I agree with your criteria for spelling reform because in this spelling reform we can still read old spelling, and it's easier than previous spelling.

Another problem with English spelling reforms is that the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, etc. would all have to agree to change. Otherwise it would get even more confusing, especially considering spelling between these countries already have some widely debated differences. Edit: changed exorcisms to especially

"Verein der Leute mit Meinungen" Ah yes. Twitters worst enemy. The gathering of people with opinions.

I remember when we read an old book(Wilhelm tell) in german class and one of the characters name was "geßler" but pronounced [gεslɐ] and everyone pronounced it [ge:slɐ]

I learned more about German spelling, than in my 16 years of being German.

I'm german and you just explained to me that there actually is a reason we use our all time favorite letter "ß" Great job with the video!

Being one of the 10 people in Belgium who speak German I can confirm that the spelling reform got adapted here

One note: While the 1996 reform (and the 1901 one before that) were major reforms, German spelings are constantly changing on a small scale. Every few years or so, words that have gone through significant changes over the years are being overhauled to add new optional spellings. Not much fuss is ever made about that because it usualy hits words that are infrequent so keeping an unusual spelling alive would be pointless. Oh, one thing English can adapt directly from the German spelling reform: Just get rid of the "ph" and replace it with "f". There is no reason for the ph to exist. It is a spelling convention derived from a language that doesn't even use the Latin alphabet and denotes a differentiation that doesn't exist in English (bilabial v labiodental fricative).

I love that sometimes in German, you can tell the age of a person by how they spell. When I get a note from someone who writes "daß" instead of "dass", "Du" instead of "du", I can immediately tell that this note was written by an older person.

I started school in 2007 directly learning the new spellings and I never realized how recent these changes were But I do remember adults often saying stuff like "the new spelling" or "ah they changed the spelling", which always confused me Also because I switched between the German and the Swiss school sytems 4 times, I had to learn the Scharfe s 'ß' twice because we don't use it in Switzerland 5:48 I misspell a lot of English words because of this like 'address' or 'development' Another problem: English doesn't seem to have an Equivalent to 'Hochdeutsch'

Bro this video was so good and high quality that i thought it must be semi-viral with hundreds of thousands of views, and i was quite surprised by the number of views you got! This video is amazing, straight to the point, and I 100% agree with the point you made. Props to you!

As a german I automaticly write many english words with double letters in places where there aren´t any supPosed to be. I think the reason is because I started learning english in 3rd school grade, so subconsciously rules of german spelling intermixed with english ones (I had english for 9 years in school and german for 12). Also like mentioned in the last bit of the video for me it makes more sensce.

I remember how everyone was angry about the reform back then and there are still people who claim that they will never get used to it...but I guess by now, most people have gotten used to it, also due to autocorrect. Even if you have learned the "old system" like I did, when you are writing and word is constantly correcting your mistakes, eventually you get used to the new one.

The most successful English spelling reform was Noah Webster's, in 1828. Not all of his recommendations were adopted, but many of them were -- at least in the USA; the rest of the English-speaking world is still slowly catching up after almost 200 years. And other simplified spellings have become unofficially accepted, even if they are still not considered to be proper English, like "thru" and "nite". "Donut" used to be in that category too, but due to the success of Dunkin' Donuts, most people now use the simplified spelling rather than "doughnut".

When looking at spelling reforms, I think the transition of the Chinese writing system and it’s drastic reform should be mentioned

I started going to school in 2009 and remember how all the books in german class also showed the old way of spelling a certain word. I thought back then that it is a regular thing to change the languange (about every 10 years) and that it is just used to fuck with people lol

2:51 I've been learning German for a couple years now, and I never realised this rule, of any of these rules for that matter, I just sort of picked it up intuitively.. very interesting, and well made video!

You make it sound easy. Back in the day, almost everyone in Germany was up in arms about the spelling reform. People complained about how the state trying to tell them how to use language was a blatant violation of their privacy (sound familiar?). One major newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, even openly refused to use the new spelling once it had become mandatory for official and school use. People used the rarest examples of words to criticize the changes, like "Delphin" to "Delfin" or downright fabricated fake examples like "Füsik" instead of "Physik". Nobody, however, talked about the "daß/dass", which is easily the most frequently used single word affected by the reform. And as a language teacher in Germany, I can reliably testify that no student ever gets the spelling of "dass" wrong (as long as they _mean_ the conjunction and do not confuse it with the article that just spells "das") - well, duh; because it follows a clear _rule._ And still nobody talks about how the reform made learning spelling _easier._ It seems that everybody who whined about it loudly back in the day does not want to draw attention to their failure in judgement, really... Which makes it so much poorer that Switzerland outright refused to join the reform and still writes words with a _long_ vowel followed by a sharp /s/ with "ss", not with "ß". Needless to say, the Franfurter Allgemeine has long since quietly adopted the reformed spelling. I suppose they, too, do not want to be reminded of how they initially swore to drop dead before they used this immature newfangled fashion.

1:03 fun fact: The in phlegmatic was originally silent as well (the word was written fleumatik or flematik among other variants in Middle English, all without ). It was only after the spelling was changed to it's modern form, that the pronunciation changed to reflect this new spelling.

Fun coincidence: when the proposed spelling reform for English “the” came up, it reminded me of how in Late Old Swedish and Early Modern Swedish the word “þe” (“they” and plural “the”; in modern language it’s “de”) was often spelled as “the” or “dhe”.

I've seen 'cafeteria' (eat-room) written in German... Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the beauty of 'Esssaal'

I like that, it's so much more intuitiv and easy. As a german I know of our spelling reforms but I never seen them make so much sense to me as I got from your video

This is the best take on English spelling reform I've ever seen. I absolutely hate the way some people complain about English spelling, especially non-English speakers who think our vowel system is whack because it's not like the continental one. Our vowel system has diverged from much of the rest of Europe, but it is perfectly systematic an learnable. It's not all memorization. I teach Japanese people English, kids to adults. Many of them super struggle with reading and spelling, often because they aren't taught phonics so they don't understand the way you break up the visual information it understandable phonetic parts. I then strive to teach them the phonics, the rules, the "fushigi na E" (magic E), or doubling consonants before ~ed or ~ing for short vowels. I teach things like "c & k get lonely easily, so at the end of short words with no other consonant, so they usually like to be together: ck" And this works. Some students of mine who do understand the phonics of reading can, just as native speakers, guess the reading of words they've never seen before with minimum mistakes. Our language is quite systematic after all, just a somewhat complex system. I think what makes it so frustrating is the long Latinate words. I often say how, unlike German, we keep more of the etymology within words. Angelo-Saxon and old French derived words fall under one fairly consistent system, while words from more modern French, from Latin or Greek roots, indeed from Italian or Spanish or German, get to keep their own orthographic style. Thus we get CHrist, CHeese, CHef, gnocCHi － these sorts of differences in how words are spelled & read. I explain these things to my students. I explain the ways words have spellings that made sense before, but the pronunciation then changed. in "light," or "though," was once pronounced, I tell them, saying that middle English pronunciation out loud for them much to their amusement. This demystifies the spelling a lot, and when you allow yourself to learn these interesting histories embedded into the words, you learn to appreciate their strangeness a lot more. And the fact that English can be unpredictable can often be a really manageable problem. I often teach my students about the three "ers." You got and and these are all the same (at least in my dialect of American English, and I think so in standard British too, even if you drop the /r/), so you have to memorize which one, but if you have to guess is the most common. That's annoying, but manageable, and you can distinguish homophones this way too: fir vs fur. I teach Japanese people, remember, and their writing system is WAY MORE intense about this kind of thing. Because they use kanji (Chinese characters), they often have homophones written with different characters: 橋 端 箸 are all read as "hashi" (though their is pitch accent involved too that differentiate them somewhat), even sligtly different nuances of what's basically the same word can be written differently: 止める、留める、停める are all "stop" but with different nuances; the middle one for "stop/stay at a hotel etc," the last one only for vehicles. This kind of complexity is not that weird, and even has a lot of usefulness and artistic potential in it. But you're right that there are spelling features of English that could be improved, especially in those Latinate vocabulary. I've got a masters degree in teaching English, and I still can't figure out if it's single or double consonants sometimes. I also don't like how "soccer" is not "socker," but that one is less of a nuisance. So that's where I want to praise what you have to say about spelling reform. You're so damn right that the best reforms are the ones that make the rules we already know and understand more consistent. English HAS had spelling reforms, just more so on my side of the pond. Every American knows about Webster and his reforms. Actually, he wasn't really "reforming" English, as it had no authoritative rules back then, only loose conventions. He chose the spelling variants he thought were simpler, the ones that followed the basic patterns more closely. Meanwhile in Britain, different conventions were becoming standardized. Webster thought the in "colour" was not necessary, while the British like the version with it, stuff like this. Other simplification he proposed didn't catch on: soop for soup, or aker for acre, but the point is they all followed the already established rules and styles that every literate person knew. And there are plenty of words that have changed or are changing just naturally, the key feature of such vernacular spelling reforms being, that they make things more consistent with our internalized rules. Risk was once "risque." In the US at least, we very often write "donut" instead of "doughnut." We've got "lite" beer instead of "light." My grandmother lives in the town of Middleborough, MA but the post accepts people writing letters addressed to "Middleboro." In super causal contexts we have "tho" for "though," and "thru" for "through." These too, could be normal spelling at some future point. English has a lot less centralized authority over spelling reforms than some other countries, so I don't see major spelling reform movements gaining traction anytime soon, but if they do, they'll be things that are putting stamps of approval on already widely used and understood vernacular spellings like "tho" and "thru," much like Webster did. I for one, think we gotta get rid of "all right." It's "alright" people! It's linguistically one word!! You can tell by the intonation pattern!

"And getting rid of silent letters!" These vowels have a problem, and Silent E's to blame! Instead of "ah", "eh", "ih", "aw", "uh", he makes them say their name. He's changed their sounds to A and E and I and O and U. With powers like that, just think about the damage he can do. Silent E! He changes cub into a cube! Silent E. He changes tub into a tube! He changes twin to twine, he changes can into a cane. And this brave man must stop him, before he strikes again!

I started school the very year the spelling reform was implemented, so I've always learned the new way. I can imagine that it would have been a bit confusing if I'd started school like 2 years earlier and suddenly had to relearn stuff I'd _just_ learned I remember adults going "argh, new spelling!" sometimes when I was a kid, but by now I haven't heard that in years. I read old library books with the old spelling without any problem. Heck I read writing by Martin Luther with only mild problems The far bigger problem with reading old german texts is the Fraktur-typeface and Sütterlin-handwriting.

Reforming english spelling probably wouldn't really work. English is just too decentralised and spread. While German is only used in comparativley few countries as an official language, not even all of them have adapted the spelling reform and there are still differences even in those that did. English meanwhile is an official language in 67 countries, many of which already have different ways of spelling, most prominently British and American English. So I reckon even if a spelling reform were to take place, it probably wouldn't be adopted by a majority of English speaking countries.

If you ask me, an easy way to solve english's bad spelling at least in part is to add diacritics to specify vowel lengths where they aren't consistent with what you would expect.

4:25 it’s somewhat misleading to show Switzerland as having adopted the new spellings, because a) Switzerland never* used the ß to begin with, so “dass”, “Fass”, etc were always written with double s here, and b) Switzerland rejected many of the new spellings outright, often because the new spellings reflected strictly the pronunciations in Germany (like Majonäse) which, particularly in the case of the (many) words of French origin, does not reflect the pronunciation in Switzerland (where words of French and Italian origin tend to be pronounced fairly faithfully to their original languages). Switzerland didn’t really appreciate being significantly ignored during the reforms, and in the end, the new spellings that were adopted largely failed to catch on, and even newspapers have reverted many things back to the old spellings (like Stengel). I was in the last entering high school (gymnasium) class that officially used the old spellings. But looking at the writing of people much younger than me, it’s clear the new orthography did not stick. Disclaimer before anyone attempts to “school” me or otherwise make inapplicable comments: I’m not talking about Swiss German (Schwiizerdütsch), the Swiss dialects of the Allemanic language. I’m talking about Swiss Standard German, the Swiss dialect of standard German (Schweizer-Hochdeutsch, as I like to call it). *not technically true, but it was used inconsistently and abandoned entirely so long ago as to be irrelevant. We can at least say that in the entire time since German abandoned Fraktur type, Switzerland has never used the Eszett.

There's already basically been a spelling reform in English when the spelling was first standardised. It's just not called a “reform”, because there was no unified spelling to reform at the time. I find it pretty fascinating. Old books are funny to read, because often you need to read it out loud for it to make sense. An old cookbook called for flower, and it took me a bit to realise they meant flour. Sometimes it’s not another words, it's something like “jinerall”, and you need to sound it out. (That's “general”, by the way, written like that in a poem quoted by The Harvard Magazine in 1861 and Davy Crockett's Almanacs before that.) As long as you sound it out and know that þ is pronounced as th, you're good. I think there’s another letter that sometimes trips me up but I can’t remember it right now. (Edit: it was the ſ, it looks more like a worn out letter f in old text, but it’s pronounced like a long s.) My point is, there's no reason a spelling reform wouldn’t be possible in English, especially how you outlined it here. The four rules make a lot of sense.

When you mentioned "developing", it really made me laugh. I assure you, every german child makes this mistake at the beginning spelling "developing" like "eloping" because for us it's the obvious pronounciation. One of the most different things in our language lessons in school is to learn and accept that many other languages don't take it serious with rules and consistency in the way the german language does :D

0:36 As someone who's suggested getting rid of the letter "c", my solution to the "ch" problem is to introduce a new letter to represent it since the "ch" sound is a distinct phoneme rather than just a "c" and "h" sound put together. The Cyrilic alphabet uses "Ч" for this sound which I quite like since it leaves less room for ambiguity.

On the topic of spelling reforms, I highly encourage you to make a video about the disaster that has been the Portuguese spelling reform of 1990: meant to bring all Portuguese-speaking nations together under a unified spelling, it has been ratified at an extremely slow pace, there was a tremendous backlash in Portugal upon its implementation and it managed to anger native speakers from all Portuguese speaking countries (not just Portugal) due to the introduction of new and inconsistent rules that violate the 1st, 3rd and 4th principles you've highlighted at the end of your video. Apart from that, I'd just like to point you I've stumbled upon your channel very recently and I believe you're massively underrated. Keep up the good work, you've gained a new subscriber.

In my 33 years as a German, I have never thought about the influence of a "ß" on vowels in my pronunciation. So I have unconsciously always applied the rule correctly, but never consciously noticed it. Exciting how language works and is learned. Thank you for opening my eyes for this little detail. :-)

Many older Germans would still disagree, but that's the nature of a reform. It's also worth mentioning, that german language rules still aren't as logical as they could - and probably should - be. But what's perfect in this world? It's actually fair to say that the German spelling reform was a good idea in its second iteration.

We might be able to use and in the contexts of meaning /s/ and /z/, at least when we already use a or a in that spot. So while face->fase is perhaps a bit drastic as a change, advise->advize is perhaps workable. Though of course it would also depend a lot on whether most dialects use the groups consistently. American spelling has already done some of it already, so spreading those spellings where it doesn’t cause confusion is perhaps one option, though words like centring vs centering show that American spelling reform obviously can’t be just blindly applied across the board. It seems reasonable to say that English really needs a bunch of spelling reforms, rather than one comprehensive spelling reform. Any spelling reform that could reasonably be implemented, will necessarily be limited and be unable to deal with most of the inconsistencies. Some if that spelling reform should also just be to teach the rules that currently exist that are widely unknown and thus only subconsciously self-taught. We do have greek, latin, and french loan words, all of which have more or less their own spelling system, none of which we teach, but make up nearly ¾ of all our words. If we could standardize on perhaps 3 spelling systems (Germanic, Latinate, and Grecian), tidy up each of those systems, push words into one of those 3 systems unless they were being spelled similar to their loanword origin to show themselves as a nonnative word (so treating jalapeño as a Spanish foreign word rather than spelling it halapeno or whatever the Latinate rules would spell that word as to treat it like a Spanish loanword). And to reiterate, it would probably have to be a multigenerational thing, and sold to be a multigenerational thing. One generation would make minor reforms to standardize one small part of English spelling. 30 years later, a different group of people would look at the system they have now grown up with and find the simple reforms that can be implemented. For example, perhaps if we used s and z to indicate /s/ and /z/ consistently, then spelling face as fase would be easily understood to be pronounced the same. Then another 30 years later the next group of English speakers could decide whether tack could be spelled as tac, tacked as tacced and take as tace as the c would be easily understood as being the same of k when c hasn’t been used to make an s or z sound for over 30 years. Maybe that’s still too short of a time period so they instead go with tack as tak and tacked as takked, take staying the same while case becomes kase, leaving ch the sole use for the letter c. In the latter ch can become c in another 30 years, the letter exclusively referring to that phoneme. In the former, c and ch are each their own phonemes and stay that way. Or maybe there’s good reasons to not do any of those reforms (probably the case), but the point remains that each reform successfully implemented should in theory make further reforms easier and while reading spelling from a hundred years ago may become difficult, there would never be a point where everyone couldn’t read because the spelling was unrecognizable. Perhaps for some of the older individuals who would have gone through 2 or 3 reforms in their lifetime this rate of change would be too much, but given how digital our life is currently, tools could be made to automatically translate spelling from one to the other, for those people who were unable to keep up with the series of reforms.

I was is school when the Rechtschreibreform happened. I immediately jumped from a 4- (D-) in spelling to a 1- (A-). I remember there were lots of heated discussions among the grown-ups about the changes. Some more conservative newspapers even refused to print the new way. But I liked it from day one. There is no good reason why our spellings must ne inconsistent.

Please don't forget that because of the double consonants rule and the way word creation works in german we literally have words with triple consonants. Best examples probably are Schifffahrt or Geschirrreiniger.

American English had a small spelling reform in the 19th century when we dropped the 'u' from words like "color", "honor", "flavor", etc.

My native language of Japanese had a large spelling reform relatively recently. Wi and we were removed as well as removing some incoherent syllables. I have some family in the mountains in Hokkaido and the dialect from pre-1945 and the difference is obvious. Especially when ‘私’ watashi (I) was made and they removed ‘わた歌詞’ watakashi (I)

4:39 Rule 1 already makes things sticky with English. It has so many contradictions that no matter what rule you try to adhere to, people will say, "Isn't that going against x precedent?" I'm not sure if English can be reformed honestly... it might be too far gone.

Fun fact: here in Switzerland we do not use the ß. We always use ss instead, even when writing "standard" German, not just in dialect. In fact all three major German speaking countries has their own version of what's correct. We even have newspapers like NZZ that have their own orthography altogether.

What you also have to consider is that German did not change Latin words, but rather pronounces them correctly, which is why Germans can read all Latin in English without too much difficulty since it is basically written the same just that we made the C (which in Latin was (in the Italian/ or nowadays Romansch (Schweitzer Dialect des Lateins)) mostly pronounced as k) to K where it was pronounced as such, which fucks with my head every time I translate any thought from English to German or vise versa. Updating Latin spelling is not a good idea if you want other to use you’re (British) version of English. What many people don’t know is that the spelling change also came with a -maybe unintentional but probably intentional- change in what pronunciation was considered „correct“ changing or killing most dialect and removing large chunks of Germanic heritage vocabulary in favor of the „proper“ word which often was Latin, Franco or Anglo in origin. There were also 3 Reforms which for a long time lead to confusion since not every teacher learned or/and taught them. English spelling also is easier if you know the basic spelling rules of Latin and more importantly French. Nobody cares but thought I’d give my 2Cents on the matter since I have some experience with Germanistik.

My one point to the proposed reform for English is just that the pronunciation is different because of stress in the word, and the problem becomes that especially in longer words, doubling consonants makes the word a whole lot longer. And ultimately, even thought we call them 'long vowels' the distinction isn't length anymore, it's actually just stress, which the word generally informs. So 'developing' and 'eloping' are different like how 'hospital' and 'hospitality' are, which is to say, with more or less syllables, the stress appears shifted away from the 'root' position. And I don't want some weird 'hospittall' vs 'hospittalitty' distinction, and would actually rather have an accent mark on non-normal stress patterns, since the English vowel system is so messed up, and where German spelling can pretty precisely reflect vowel pronunciation in that subtle way, we just can't. We need umlauts before double letters.

I just started to go to elementary school when the spelling was reformed in Germany. I remember that my teacher had some problems teaching us the new way because she was already like 60 or so and it was weird for her at first and we often heard that "dass" is the new way of writing "daß" for example. She often had to remember that we need to learn the new way but after a year it also became normal for her.

4:33 The kerning of letters in the title pops back and forth here. It’s subtle.

Portuguese, both the european and Brazilian varieties, has gone through many spelling reforms throughout the 20th century, to the extent a 19th century text feels extremely weird to read (you can still read it, it's just unconfortable). the "Grammatica Philosophica da Lingua Portugueza(1822)" would now be spelt "Gramática Filosófica da Língua Portuguesa", "finaes" became "finais", "Brazil" became "Brasil", "directo" became "direto" and many other changes. The most recent reform was in 1990, which wanted to bring closer the two varieties, and ironically made spelling less consistent in both of them, because each side had to make acommodations for the other. Brazilians had to sacrifice the stress mark in "idéia (ideia)" that meant it was pronounced different from "sereia" and the portuguese lost the mute consonat in "director (diretor)" that meant the "e" was not reduced.

Honestly i think the spelling reform that i like the most is bringing back þ and ð, not because it’s just a better way of doing things, but just because i like the symbols lol

As a german who grew up with the new spelling rules, I’m glad that I didn’t have to learn and use the old spelling versions. Every time I read an older german text, I just see how confusing they sometimes were. Sadly our grammar rules are still terrible…

the more i learn about other languages the more thankful i am that spelling is so straightforward in spanish. compared to what english and german and many other languages have, spanish almost spells itself. the most "confusing" aspects about spelling in spanish are just homophones, allophones (spelling z with s, or y with ll), and tildes (but if you know the rules for tildes you can tell 90% of the time if a word has tilde or not from the pronunciation alone).

We've got a spelling reform in french that was very nice, imo. (got rid of the useless "i" in "oignon", of the accent in "û" wherever it doesn't bring anything, etc.) What scares me is that there was so much defensive reactions to this reform, like it's an attack to the purity/integrity/history of the language, we will all write like idiots, and so on.

Great video, but to me "devellopping" looks like it'd be pronounced like "deh vel lop ing", "lop" like "lop their head off" which sounds like "law-p".

I mean the thing with english is that the problems are so deep that any regularizing changes would have a good case for extending for the rest of its combinations. Like, Thorn and Ed’s wouldn’t created massive problems. And “completely redoing the vowel system” would only be true *on paper*. And languages that are highly phonemic still represent their irregularities nakedly and people just have to deal with them, just as they do in speech. And we deal with homophones all the time. In orthographic reform, one has to accept those sorts of things. And i think with English, as has been seen with the internet and typesetting, simplification is the way to go. The Thorn/Edh examples you brought up have already moved on informally for some of them: Tho, *thot, thru, tuff. The way vowels and diphthongs are represented are also a core issue. Additionally-and i know this is a polarizing opinion-at some point the importing in of foreign words unadaptedly is unwieldy and impractical, especially given on how much of the false assumed commonality it relies on (which starkly breaks down quickly with languages that have very large consonant inventories, such as Taa).

The problem with english speöling is many words come from french/latin, which means changing one word spelling would require changing the other words derived from it, for example if you write devellopping, then you have to use develloppement which is not near to how you pronounce it.

as someone who speaks french, that shade on an "english" academy was pure genius perhaps next shade you can throw at the french is their weird refusal to pronounce (or even ackowledge) the german "-ch" from "ich" correctly ;)

May I suggest writing the soft "g" as "j"? And may I also suggest changing the word ending "-ize" to "-ise"? Ex.: "sanitize" ---> "sanitise"

I feel like English just might be too far gone for any meaningful spelling reforms. It has a much more complicated history and evolution than, for example, the German language.

With English being a heavily mixed language, I feel as though any spelling reform would have to take into account the root language of each word. Are there any other languages that are as heavily influenced by other languages such as English? Or close seconds?

Your fourth requirement is the reverse for the New Spelling. It allows several spellings in some cases which makes it a little easier to write, but definitely harder to read. Texts are for the reader, not the writer.

Another spelling reform that worked well is the one for Afrikaans. It was originally intended for Dutch too and was actually meant for Dutch and not Afrikaans but for some reason it never materialised and only Afrikaans got the reform. The main changes were to remove diphthongs that sounded the same, mainly compressing au, ou, ouw and auw into just ou and changing the t in tie and tion to an s because that is how you pronounce it. Another change is changing the ij to a y. ij is considered one letter and is even called Greek I or y so it makes sense why it was changed. These are only a few of the changes but most were pretty minor, but made Afrikaans a language that is very easy to spell and it is spelled 100% phonetically. I was quite surprised at how weird some of the Dutch spelling are when I learnt it and its significantly harder to remember compared to Afrikaans. However its not worse to read though, just harder to write.

One of the problems with trying to reform spelling (which usually means trying to make it more phonetic) is that the more closely coupled the spelling is to pronunciation, the farther away spelling becomes from the various regional dialects and accents. Somewhat imprecise spellings provide a sort of abstraction layer between the underlying phonology and the actual pronunciation in a dialect.

This vid is of good quality for sure (i mean, even if we are talking about the editing only), so keep up the good work!

As a German who has only lived in the age of the spelling reform I can confidently say that I absolutely detest it and I still use "daß" unless I have to write something official. I am proud of the letter ß and hate seeing it get used so much less. Languages should have their irregularities and inconsistencies and quirks. That is the fun of learning languages! If we wanted to just make things easier we could simply start writing everything the way it sounds. But nah. I like my daß and keep using it. Just like it's "Potential" and not "Potenzial" and "Photografie" and not "Fotografie".

I started learning to write in school shortly after the spelling reform in Germany, I actually remember my teacher telling us when we opened our word books for the first time "If your book was one passed down from an older sibling, you'll notice that some of the spelling has changed." The concept seems almost surreal now that I live in the US, I can't believe how smooth the transition was

In German, two consonants following a vowel also shorten the vowel: Fast and Art, have short A's. Fahrt adds the "h" to lengthen the a again.

2:44 In „Ofen“, the „o“ should not only be long, but closed like in „yawn“ (Britisch Received Pronounciation). Your „Ofen“ wasn‘t understandable, because your „o“ wasn‘t closed enough and it has to be one straight sound. I like your video, so I gave it a thumb up. And your idea to implement more double consonants in English is not bad. ;)

4:12 That's not fully correct. In Switzerland we don't use the "ß" at all and as far as I know never did or at least haven't used it in a very long time.

There are occasions when a new spelling makes sense. indict -> indite ghost -> gost gauge -> gage laugh -> lauf When it "komes" to c you seem to think that the only options are getting rid of all of them or neither of them. We "kould" get rid of some of them. Let's spell every /k/ sound with a k (except for Xs and Qs). character -> karakter accident -> akcident occasion -> okkasion In the kase of 'ck' let's get rid of the c. block -> blok BUT blocking -> blokking And sure, you'll get some inkonsistencies like elektrik - elektricity but it's still a better system.

Being italian, where you read like you wrute except a few rules that are very simple, the hardest part about english is speaking correctly

There is still a word that bothers me as a native speaker and I regularly write it wrong: "gesamt" (total): It is pronounced "gesammt" with a short a, while "gesamt" looks like it is pronounced with a long "a". It also looks like it comes from the word "Samen" (seed (noun)) as verb in participle form "gesamt" (seeded). German has different words for "a seed" and "to seed" so it is not ambiguous, but it looks like it could be.

English doesn't need a spelling reform, but a language reform. Let's go back to 1000 AD and start over, sticking with Late West Saxon spelling conventions.

Well, the german spelling reform was implemented and made imo some minor things more logical, but..... The spelling reform did not touch on the main things that people do get wrong when writing, e.g. the use of capital letters. So I think it should not be said that it "worked". It would say it was "done"

My personal ideas for an English spelling reform: 1) Bring back þ, ð and æ into English. Þ for the voiceless dental fricative, Ð fpr the voiced dental fricative, and Æ for the near-open front unrounded vowel. 2) Get rid of the voiceless alveolar fricative sound and the voiceless velar plosive sound for C, and have it be just the voiceless postalveolar affricate instead. 3) Get rid of the voiced alveolar fricative for S, and have it take only the voiceless alveolar fricative in all instances, with Z taking the voiced alveolar fricative in all instances as well.

About spelling reforms not working, the Portuguese Orthographic Agreement of 1990 is a very good example. It basically killed the language and divided portuguese-speaking countries instead of unifying them, as it proclaimed, and it made the language so full of inconsistencies, ambiguities and incongruities. Ironically enough, standard portuguese was the most affected... And you wouldn't believe me if I told you that all the criticism it received was completely ignored and the only proposal to change it - that didn't change a lot from the Agreement - was rejected.

He ignores the anti-Q argument because its too strong fellow kweens.

No need for spelling reforms, just grammatical reforms. Make English Anglisch Again. Use only Germanic words in the English language

3:50 wow, if someone had explained it that way in fourth class, I would have had it much easier.

Holy shit I’m German and you just explained my language to me better than anyone ever has before

An easier way to solve this is to introduce accent marks in English and adjust them to fit the rules of English. For example, we could use circumflex like French. "Anger" would not need one. But then we could write "Ângel" with one. We could say; "the farmer taught his sow to sôw". English used to have what German calls the umlaut although English had a different name for it that I can't remember now. It was used to show when double vowels were pronounced separately such as "coöperate". It could be used in words like "reädmit" or "reörder". Rather than changing spelling, this way, we'd just have to remember which marks to use.

Totally agree 👍 Do you have any idea how many times I have typed "LITTERALLY" in a text only to be CORRECTED into SPELLING it LITERALLY??

One issue that I see is that spelling reform in German was minor. They only really needed minor tweaks here and there. Inconsistency or irregularity litters the entirety of English spelling, forcing a perfectly consistent spelling reform to be radical. You would either need to sacrifice consistency (make it "better" but not perfect), or accept that it would basically look like gibberish to someone who has not learned the rules yet - which would make garnering public support a monumental task

Never thought I’d feel nostalgic for high school German class

Making a interesting video on spelling reforms is hard. I respect the fact that you did it.

One further problem with reforming english is that german is only really spoken in five countries which have pretty close relations to eachother. But english is spoken in a metric sh**ton of places and it's going to be impossible to get them all to agree.

Here in Switzerland, the ß was surprisingly not adapted. Also, at 4:22 you did a great job on excluding the welsh (french speaking) part of Switzerland but forgot to exclude the Tessin (Speaking Italian). Great Video though!

One particular change I didn't see mentioned here(and I used to quarrel about with my parents a lot) was getting rid of the rule that compound words comprised of the first word ending with two of the same letter, and the second word starting with that same letter, you had to omit one of them, eg. Schneeule instead of Schneeeule(Schnee/snow; Eule/owl), Schiffahrt instead of Schifffahrt(Schiff/ship;Fahrt/voyage or cruise). They were like "we used to learn it like that", with me being "But it's completely illogical to arbitrarily dictate that more than 2 of the same letter after another is incorrect spelling!". There sure were opponents to the reform here in Germany, but it's mostly boomers unwilling to change as per usual.

Or in another words, just use American spellings lol. Color, gray, aluminum, realiZe. Makes so much more sense.

This idea definetely deserves more attention! Let's not be afraid of changes!

I'm german, and was in school as the 2006 reform happened... never really understood the rules between the changes, and even the 1996 changes where confusing as many older people still use some style from before then. I don't need to write in german to often, so everytime I got to write a word where I remember there being differences in spelling, it's time to ask google and hope I make sense of the answer. Honestly, this video did a better job at explaining it then the many years I had in school... and the video isn't even in german! Thanks mate for this great explanation.

As a German, I'd like to add that whilst the spelling reform did many good things, it also has some flaws

There's in fact a reform proposal called TSR (traditional spelling revised) that does exactly that: fixes small things by generalizing existing rules. So it fixes double letters (but only after the stressed syllable), it fixes "ou" (it should always sound as in mouth), "ea" (it should sound as in sea), and just a few other things. The rest stays the same. It even has reasonable exceptions so that very common words don't change. Too bad it isn't widely known... But I think it isn't completely finished yet anyway.

i really like the ph and silent g in phlegm because all those consonants makes saying to word feel like you have a bunch of phlegm in your throughtw