If you could improve the English language, what would you change?

I’ve had enough with the thought of getting caught prounouncing ”-augh” and ”-ough” words incorrectly, I’m through with it. There ought to be a change.

I wouldn’t, nothing about the english language bothers me

I would make the letters easier to distinguish.

I would allow the creation of concatenated words as needed, rather than inserting hyphens between them.

I would add a semihemicolon to the punctuation. It would appear as colon above a coma.

I would fix the pronouns, so we would have gender neutral ones, and also a way to distinguish between second person specific (“You look like a monkey.”) and second person hypothetical, sometimes designated by “one” (“One/You should avoid smelling like a monkey, if possible.”)

Ain’t IS a word so get over it, and it’s perfectly fine to end a sentence in a preposition, got it!?

The English language is a glorious, indivisible, uncontrollable mess, and should be venerated for its flexibility and scope (as should all languages).

Sure, there are certain areas of the language that are more complex than others. Contrary to popular belief, the grammar of English is pretty simple; collocation and other phrase-level interactions are where its complexities lie. However, I strongly believe that attempting to standardise English in any way is simply pissing in the wind. The French and Spanish language “academies” (ha!) try to regulate their respective languages, but that doesn’t stop the French talking about what they did at le weekend.

@12Oaks – “ain’t” is actually a very old contraction, dating back to Elizabethan times and the American revolution. Who says it ain’t so?

Moreover, ending a sentence with a preposition is someting up with which I will not put, to channel (I believe) Churchill.

@12Oaks Word or not, I say aint all the time.

get rid of all the slang words that people keep telling me are being added to the american dictionary. We don’t need more words, we need less words in our language.

Every English teacher I had the displeasure of knowing.

@12Oaks: I’m an English teacher. Rock on with your bad self and rest secure in the knowledge that they were/are wrong.

Everyone uses slang. If some is so prim and proper that they cannot use slang then I would think those types of people are very very boring and probobly not really fun to talk to

I’ve grown up with it and quite like it the way it is even the strange spellings.

Is differentiating between “less” and fewer” still important? We could certainly rid the language of subtlety and nuance and still be understood much of the time.

Is it less important to have fewer words in the language, or is it?

what about ya’ll, you’ns, you fers, you know, Kentucky English, I live in Southwestern ohio so I am very familiur with Kentucky English.

There are absolutely times it’s OK to end a sentence with a preposition. Just ask Grammar Girl. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/

But there are a few words missing that I end up using Norwegian because they just don’t exist in English and I think they should.

There is no proper plural of ‘you’. In Norwegian it’s ‘dere’.... Old English had these, and was preserved like the Quakers spoke. American’s say ‘Yous’ but that’s not actually correct English.

There are a few other words, like ways to describe types of snow and a snowy or icy walking surface that there isn’t a succinct word for in English.

Then there is the word in Norwegian that means not quite ‘envy’, but also ‘I’m happy for you that you have that, or got that.’ We say, ‘Jeg unner deg denne.’ (I missing word you that.)
Unne® is hard to explain in English because there is no simple word for it. I guess envy gets used in it’s place, but then you’d have to understand the relationship to know if it’s the ‘bad envy’ or the ‘good envy’... We may start by saying ‘Congratulations’ to the person and then say I unner deg.. When the person buys the car they wanted, or boat or some such thing.

Should we treat all states as being created equal? If Kentucky, then Ohio, no?

@gailcalled I love Kentucky and Ohio

@Mikewlf337: Including southwestern Ohio?

Nope… I will not abide ‘ya’ll’ or ‘all ya’ll’ as English.

@gailcalled Yes That is my home. I love it.

“You” actually is it’s own plural form. You started out being formal/plural, but ended up taking over thee, with used to be singular informal. Now, you is used as singular, formal or informal, and many people tend to use “ya’ll,” “you all,” or “you guys” to mean plural, since “you” is open to misinterpretation.

@Mikewlf337 you’n, yusses and yourn are from Pittsburgh.

@BarnacleBill I hear it all the time in Kentucky.

Nah. Like @the100thmonkey says, it’s fine the way it is. I could wish that native speakers would learn to spell its words correctly and use them more clearly in sentences, and avoid the use of non-words such as “snuck”, and avoid putting apostrophe’s (sic) where they dont (sic) belong and use them where they do. But the language itself is a wonderful, glorious, growing mess, and I love it just the way it is – and the way it is becoming. It is very becoming, I think.

I’ve snuck into places!

I would abolish the situation where two words can be spelled exactly the same but be pronounced with different vowel sounds such as “read” and “read”. I don’t know any other language in the world that allows such a thing to occur. And I would probably alter the spellings of words with “ough” so it doesn’t have to make 6 sounds…

I would also create a proper gender neutral pronoun that isn’t plural. :)

I would remove the words ain’t and cunt from every living persons vocabulary!!!

Sometimes, I just wonder why we have to have so many versions of one word? Maybe the cavemen were really smarter in the sense that all they did was say words to get their point across. Of Course, that may lead to misinterperetation, but we could find our way around using context and common sense. Maybe insted of “went” just say “past go” or something? And I feel that sometimes the word “the” is overused…you could tak that out in some places…of course, homophones and homonyms are a pain, too.

All I’d want is volume control. ;)

I would eliminate semicolons.

@lucillelucillelucille And I would turn the volume down, down.

If it’s a phonetic language, I think it might as well look what it sounds like—e.g. Spanish or Italian. I can see no particular reason to keep it so inconsistent.

@faye exactly :)

I think curse words should not be in the english dictionary lol idk .

But @silent4geeta that’s one of the best ways to distinguish a good dictionary from a great one.

sure it is lol @WasCy

@gailcallled “less” has been used with count nouns since King Alfred. The supposed distinction is more of a trend: “less” tends to be used more with noncount nouns, but there is a tradition of using it with count nouns. I don’t see how removing this distinction would make a difference. After all we don’t make a distinction in the other direction – is it more important to have more words?

James Joyce found quotation marks as an “eye-sore” so he outright refused to use them, if something’s bothersome like that, ignore it. Otherwise, I completely adore words and syntax; I wouldn’t change them at all…

A simple Yes and No would be better so .. get rid of the maybees and i dont knows hehe

Some of my friends dabble in a modified version of English called E-Prime in which the primary change is the elimination of the verb “to be”. The idea was originally formulated by physicists noting the false impression of static-ness imparted by much of the English language. Mostly my friends use this in writing, as have I. Some go further to what they call E-Primitive, which is a takeoff of E-Prime in which many nouns are replaced with verb-phrases, in order to foster more relationally-oriented thought and communication. It’s largely based on understanding extant indigenous languages and the drastic differences in noun and verb usage in them compared to “civilized” languages.

@incendiary_dan – I’m curious. Could you give an example of some sentences in E-Prime and E-Primitive that follow the rules you mentioned?

@sarahsugs:

“That coat is nice” -> “I like that coat” (E-Prime; removing the verb “be” to avoid misunderstandings which stem from confusion of the multiple uses of the verb)

“He is a doctor” -> “He heals” (E-primitive; replacing both the copula – “be” – and the noun phrase – “a doctor” – with a verb phrase.

I must admit that I’m very sceptical of the historical and philosophical foundations for both modifications; they’re derived from a very – arguably untenably – strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

@the100thmonkey
so it is just choosing different phrases that don’t contain “be”?
I was thinking that it would take on more of a caveman-like sound…oh well; it is what it is

Cavepeople are a trope.

@sarahsugs The examples @the100thmonkey give are pretty good.

@the100thmonkey Yea, I was always skeptical of it than a few of my friends are. As much as I’m a huge fan of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, I think it comes at it from a less than useful angle. It makes great writing, though. One of my friends wrote his book in E-Prime.

Wow. This is a really cool topic (and probably deserves another thread).

I’ve just been reading up on E-prime and E-primitive. Fascinating.
From a Zen point of view, one might argue that many of the problems we have stem from the fact that people are uncomfortable “being”, and so they spend their life “doing’ rather than enjoying the process/existence of things.

I had a friend suggest that the way we socially interact (“How’re doing?”) focuses on our doing, our achievements, rather than our state of mind (“How’re you feeling?”—which comes up only in moments of crisis) .

I agree though, that the use of active verbs make for more dynamic writing; and also makes people take responsibility for what they say.

I just listened to a professor from Auckland University speak and he’s studying the origin of language. He has some very interesting theories on it. The E-prime stuff sounds odd but according to this professor, as language progresses and spreads, the more complex sounds we lose, so perhaps removing the ‘be’ verb is the next progression? Here’s a link to the professor and his work.
http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/quentin-atkinson/

Linguist Mark Liberman talks about Atkinson’s research: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3090

There are some concerns about how Atkinson measured phoneme diversity.