@Freyrs_stories
will also only have the impact of greatly reducing the number of people who submit stories.
I disagree that a standard spelling reduces input. I base that on the ease of changing spelling rules in most word processors. Though I do not 100% say that this is the complete truth. people will write if they want to write. If they write to US English regardless of where they're from I'm saying that, that habit may make things a little easier on the statistically 'normal' reader. Also US English is the default setting on most computers that I come across, and as a result the word processor. I know a Canadian teacher who would wind himself into knots each time his PC reset itself to 'US'. He wasn't computer illiterate by any stretch but it was always funny to hear him ranting about the horror of being 'forced' into 'US' mode. It turns out his work's IT department was just too lazy to set the SOE to the local setting so it was left as US and that was why the issues kept resurfacing.
The majority of English speakers actually don't speak either American or British English
I have to agree here. also there are English speaking Chinese. I don't know what flavor they use but there would be nearly as many Chinese English users as Indian. From memory the therm in International English, which is probably some bastard child of many dialects with unique localisations dependent on many factors. also people who learn International English tend to use those funky characters that denote which sound it meant to be used with each word.
Those would of made learning English much easier for me in school, but I'm pretty sure that would of been beyond the scope of a rural school in a catchment bigger than 'Washington DC', I know there's a Washington state too but with a regional population of less than 4 maybe 5,000. Spread that over dozens of 'local' lower level schools before everyone being funneled into one of only two high schools and the resources at the time I was being educated, teachers wouldn't of had any idea what the characters meant, meaning they couldn't of taught me for love nor money.
From memory the American spelling 'reforms' date from the 1820's, the reasons for the reforms varying from 'simplification' and differentiating from the actual English who were still on the nose from that little ~1776 kerfuffle. Just to think of it, it won't be that long before people who were born 200 years after that date come up on the reform date. I'm neither American nor British though of Scots decent and don't really like the English that much. The only English I like is also called 'screw' and is used playing pool.
But what 'if' there was another option besides the fractured mess that is English. There are plenty of 'constructed' languages, perhaps using one of those would quite down those cheese eating surrender monkeys who insist that French is the official language of 'earth'. See the Olympics and the gold disk on a certain spacecraft that passed the heliopause and shock.
But I digress, if I had learnt International English before school, then school would of been much easier. I mean, I did understand English, My parents spoke it after all but it was not the day to day language in the house. There were a few of those depending when exactly you refer to but for some reason I didn't understand that other people who looked like me couldn't speak the languages I did. Most of the people I'd met in my early years spoke at least two if not three languages and only fell back to English late in the evening when everyone else had gone to bed, only sometimes including me. I've always had trouble falling asleep and going to bed early was some form of torture as I'd lay there for hours waiting for that sleep thing to happen.
Now expecting great swaths of the population to learn a language that is not their 'native' tongue is not really feasible. I'm an anomaly, if you count programming languages and spoken and 'other' I'm up well over a dozen in my handful of decades. Don't let anyone tell you that learning a programming language is different from a conventional one. it's just that most of them use US English as the core of the syntax, which as I said elsewhere is where I constantly come unstuck.
Does anyone here know what the basis of International English is, US/British I'd be keen to know. I had other relatives that learnt International English but I didn't really talk to them about the fine details of that Vs the local 'flavour' when they too transferred to a local school for their high school years. The internet hadn't really taken off here just then so US English would of really stood out, I feel a little sorry for them in their timing of changing 'systems' though by then US spellings were starting to intrude on our systems so it may have been less of a 'shock'. I still argue with people how to spell Gaol, even my local spell checker flags it.
But I'll let you all get back to your days, this is just meant to be a 'talk' about how a return to a 'single' English standard might ease some things. Change may not always be fore the better and it may take longer for some of the reasons for those negatives to fall out.
F.
