i know that "things were better when I was younger" is something we often fall for even when it's not true but every so often you find out that like they stopped teaching kids how to read in most of the USA and now fucking Mississippi is top 10 in educational achievement because they're one of the only states that still does, or you'll overhear a kid complaining to their mother that their teacher doesn't let them use AI and they have to go to websites and you hear her respond with "it's going to be everywhere in the future they shouldn't stop you from using it" and then you read the news and find out that yet another person has been killed by someone who was out on bail for murdering someone else and basically everything seems kinda bleak.

@haematophage they wha

no more reading? what?

@coolbean they stopped teaching phonics in a lot of schools in the US and Canada for some fucking reason, instead there was a push for more"holistic" and "balanced" approaches because 'phonics confuse kids because sometimes letters make unusual sounds' and now they teach kids things like "sight words" and the "three cueing approach" etc. which is where you teach the kid to recognise a few dozen important words visually like they're chinese characters and then guess what the other words mean from pictures or context and then magically they learn how to read. except they don't, it's literally all guessing.

here in ontario the human rights commission actually forced the ministry of education to switch back to phonics a couple years ago after a long inquiry that basically concluded that "whole word" reading instruction caused lifelong impairment and disproportionately so in children with a predisposition to learning disabilities.

@haematophage ...

ok, this kind of convinced me that english genuinely needs either spelling reforms or a new logographic writing system altogether. if we're gonna teach it logographically we might as well do it properly

@haematophage honestly fuck it lets put on our tinfoil hats because i genuinely believe this is an attempt to turn poor people attending public schools borderline illiterate to make organising resistance against the fascist regime harder

@coolbean

english spelling reform is impossible for infinity reasons, logographies are objectively the worst writing system, and both of these things are more true in the age of the computer than they have ever been.

plus english spelling really isnt as bad as people think, and most of the time the spelling → sound relationship is predictable. like sure, the -ough words are annoying, but they are the exception. it especially kills me when people are like "erm uhm technically u can spell fish like "ghoti". first of all, word initial gh is always /g/, it is only ever /f/ at the end of words as part of the larger -ough spelling. same sort of complaint with the -ti, except it's even worse because -ti as 'sh' is absolutely predictable.

Third of all, and more to the general point, you cannot touch english vowel spellings. you cannot. there is no way to reform english vowel spelling. consonants you might get away with, but vowels being written the same by everyone is like half of what keeps english from turning into a bunch of semi-mutually intelligible sister languages


also also, changing English spelling would make the KJV and Shakespeare less accessible, and that is the opposite of how things should go. (on the topic of education, i think it is morally indefensible to not teach children shakespeare and that the decline in biblical literacy is a very bad sign for society as a whole ― im not saying this in a religious way, i'm saying this in a "Everything that was written in English for the past 400+ years, and all products of English (and Canadian and American) culture as a whole, assumed that anyone who interacted with them would know the Bible and Shakespeare." way

@haematophage @coolbean

> also also, changing English spelling would make the KJV and Shakespeare less accessible, and that is the opposite of how things should go. (on the topic of education, i think it is morally indefensible to not teach children shakespeare and that the decline in biblical literacy is a very bad sign for society as a whole ― im not saying this in a religious way, i'm saying this in a "Everything that was written in English for the past 400+ years, and all products of English (and Canadian and American) culture as a whole, assumed that anyone who interacted with them would know the Bible and Shakespeare." way

This last bit truly terrifies me in a way most people don't even begin to understand. Not just that it's happening, but that we're increasingly abandoning the idea of a literary canon or prestige language entirely in favor of just conceding to some form of YOLOism and expecting the coming generations to hack through the thicket in the expectation that things will still somehow be all right. In losing sight of a common tongue, we lose sight of the other things common to us as well and that, in time, can only lead to factionalism, balkanization, and the inevitable spilling of innocent blood.

@haematophage @coolbean >"b-but muh increasing pace of technology and communication makes any kind of standardization impossible"
Don't care, phonics in every reading class and Dr Eliot's Five Foot Shelf in every drawing room

@allison @haematophage @coolbean

"Whole Reading" was a plague.

@LoliHat It was too long ago to remember whether my grade school reading classes were whole word or phonic, but I do remember that I learned to read outside of them, I became more literate than my peers, but I also ended up with more linguistic idiosyncracies compared to them and this came to bite me in the ass down the line.

@allison @coolbean it's sooo bad. i like vampire the masquerade, and in vampire the masquerade Cain(e) was turned into the first vampire as punishment for killing Abel.

On more than one occasion, I have had to explain who Cain and Abel were. Once, I even had to explain who Adam and Eve were. and I'm specifically adjusting for the disproportionate Chinese-ness of my irl circles here (exclusively counting personal meatspace familiarity, i am two degrees of separation** from xi jinping). i am exclusively referencing interactions with people who were raised in a western culture.


**where one degree of separation is the lowest possible number, i.e. interacting with someone yourself is one degree

@haematophage @coolbean Excuse my coarse language, but as an adult in a western society, how the fuck do you not know the primeval history? Next to some parts of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and bits of the New Testament, that's easily the most referenced part of The Bible, to the point that even if you've never read it you'll glean at least the cliffs notes of it by simple osmosis and living in a society.

@allison @haematophage @coolbean

> Next to some parts of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and bits of the New Testament, that's easily the most referenced part of The Bible

This is what happens when pastors hyperfocus on Heavy Metal, pre-woke D&D, and… daycare.

@LoliHat Most of those so-called 'pastors' increasingly reject The Bible now for being "woke", but that's a story for another day.

@allison @coolbean

fun random interaction i just remembered: was playing a board game at my friend's place and his girlfriend was there and writing came up and fanfiction came up and she mentioned that sibling incest is significantly more popular and "normalised" in chinese fanfiction compared to english fanfiction because of the one child policy. like. there's not really an "ick" response to it because siblings arent really a thing there. this doesnt really have anything to do with the convresation but i felt like the people here would enjoy that tidbit

@haematophage @coolbean incredible lore, truly china never ceases to amaze the more I hear about it

@allison

You'd be surprised how much the *correct* potato salad at the church picnic determines if you are going to hell or not according to some people…

@LoliHat Oh I wouldn't be surprised at all, there's a reason I studiously avoid such gatherings. If the church I inhabit isn't freaks by disposition from top to bottom, what you might in various ways call the refuse of society, I can't be sure of it being a legit thing and not just a larp for social acceptability.

@LoliHat Like to put it another way, you'd better have a *reason* for walking in those doors.

@allison @haematophage @coolbean that is a literally a common trope in self aware japanese comedy mangas, the only brocons and siscons are people without siblings.

@nuukaset @haematophage @coolbean Yeah, that's definitely something I could believe. Sadly a number of people I've known over the years, for various reasons, haven't gotten the memo.

@haematophage slightly insane and controversial take but why shouldnt english splinter into sister languages. it makes perfect sense that anglophones across like 3 continents would diverge at some point. its already basically how hanzu works where everyone writes something mostly the same but speaks it very differently

@haematophage america isnt a colony anymore. it can do its own thing

actually as a matter of fact a lot of more fucked up spelling (like particularly those that try to capture the latin etymology above the english pronunciation) started in america

@coolbean because a) that's a terrible idea,
b) all of the downsides of spelling reform still hold if you do that,
c) english is objectively the best option for a lingua franca and that kind of requires there to be one English, and d) those changes happened way before america, there are jokes in shakespeare plays about the b in debt. america is the only place that has ever actually implemented an organised spelling reform and that was noah webster stuff

@allison @haematophage @coolbean I used to think the French Academy was a bit silly for its fight against English loan words but compared to the “anything goes” approach in the Anglosphere maybe it’s not so bad.

@pettanko @haematophage @coolbean my honest take is that both have their upsides and downsides, english being a more flexible language without a standard governing body has its advantages but ultimately if there's no informal cultural canon to conserve it, it will split apart from the inside out (for an extreme example of this in action, compare maltese to every other language in the dialect continuum of arabic, knights hospitalier forcibly converting everyone on malta to christianity made it so that the qur'an and hadith could not act as a conserving force on malta's arabic dialect, eventually leading it to evolve into a different language entirely)

@allison @coolbean @pettanko to be fair the various Arabic dialects should be considered separate languages (at the very least, a line should be drawn somewhere between Maghrebi and Mashriqi), the only thing holding them together is that every educated dialect-Arabic speaker also speaks MSA, which is more or less classical Qur'an Arabic with an intentionally simplified grammar.

If European Christians didn't have the whole Enlightenment thing, and the Bible was never published in anything but Latin, I'm sure the Romance languages would be in a similar position with Latin in the place of MSA.

@haematophage @coolbean @pettanko yeah there's a reason I was a little ambiguous with my wording around languages and dialects. as for the linguistic situation of european christendom (when it still existed as a more or less unitary body), that's a very good point, but as always, prots gonna prot, it can't be helped.