Now if we could only get more people to use it… there’s a nail salon near our house that proudly declares itself “Finger’s & Toe’s”. I wince every time I see their sign… unless it’s run by two people with the nicknames of Finger and Toe, they really need to check their punctuation.
Yeah, that sign is pretty bad. But still, since when does it make sense to use an apostrophe for “the cat’s toy” but then not use it for “its toy”? I still think they should just overhaul the English language and give it consistent rules for grammar, spelling and punctuation so that there are no dumb exceptions that you just have to memorize (like those on Apostrophe.me).
If such illustrious personages as Ben Franklin, Noah Webster, and Samuel Clemens couldn’t get the English language overhauled (and they tried), then there isn’t much chance that you and I could do it today, when there are so many more people speaking and writing it.
But there’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon. English is the language of the World Wide Web, which means that a lot more people are learning it as a second language than ever before. That makes for a lot more people to (mis)use it, and some of those misuses will become accepted alternatives over time. I’ve already seen small shifts and simplifications in the language just from reading my parents’ childhood books when I was younger, and even more as I’ve gotten older.
English is sort of like Windows, very crufty and lots of buggy software (large imprecise vocabulary.) 😉 Spanish is completely phonetic, French is very precise (the reason for it being, until recently, the language of choice for diplomacy), and Hebrew is not only phonetic, albeit optionally without vowels (which are unneeded for discerning meaning) the very spelling of the consonants tells you the probable meaning of the word – due to the triconsonental root system of semetic languages. (Well, Modern Hebrew is an exception, due to the large number of English loan words.)
I could make a case (albeit a weak one at the moment) for the idea that the very cruft and imprecision of English is what makes it most useful, due to the way our brains are wired. But that’s a subject for a different day.
Useful for some things but not others, especially if you subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis you’d have to say that. (The Klingon, Wharf, was named after this linguistic hypothesis – as the Klingon language is an artificial example of it.)
Eskimos, for example, have lots of words for snow… English is a pretty good all-purpose language due to its large vocabulary and promiscuous acceptance of words from other languages. (German, for example, tends to “translate” words from other languages into German rather than adopting them. For example, the word “telephone”, which many languages have adopted without modification, becomes in German “fahr spaiker” (if I recall correctly) “far speaker” in German.)
I’ve heard that multilingual programmers often switch to English when discussing technical topics, even when they share a non-English native language with their audience. But being hopelessly monolingual myself, I have little experience to back it up.
Somewhat irrelevant observation: Eskimos don’t have “lots of words” for snow. Those with some authority on the subject say there are four, seven, or fifteen different ones. Others have been exaggerating it from there (“over one hundred” is commonly quoted today).