Change occurs because of the human action model: I am unhappy where I am; I visualize a better place; I see a realistic path from one place to the other.

Just because some, forgive me, technocrat tells me something new is better doesn’t make it so. It is the same reason we never embraced the metric system–we’re rebels!

I was thinking the other day about what would have to happen for English spelling to be standardized, and I don’t see how you could do it without making almost everybody in the English speaking world mad.

For one thing, there are such a wide variety of pronunciations in English, that we would have to select one as the “correct” pronunciation for phonetic spelling. Imagine we picked a non-rhotic dialect, and for all us Americans “car” became “ca,” “far” became “fa” etc.

Not to mention if we expanded the alphabet along the lines of the IPA, it could end up having around 48 letters!

Not to say that it can’t be done. It would just be difficult.

Keep up the good work on your blog.

Daniel Welsch.
Linguist and ESL teacher in Madrid, Spain.