To be played on my deathbed / at my funeral. 
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I was thinking:
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I think you’d enjoy “Because Internet,” which is an exploration of the internet’s effects on how people communicate. The author does a good job of looking at the ways writing & printing changed talking and vice versa, how telephony and telegraphy changed writing and talking, and how the internet and texting are influencing writing and talking. I can’t remember her name, but her book is a great read.
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Gretchen McCulloch
Adam Conover had her on Factually for a very good episode as well
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Fascinating perspective, but dubious. What about other languages at the same time? Printing in England was quite centralized compared to some countries; printing presses were closely controlled by the government for a long time. And this sentence seems like circular logic: “People read faster when they’re familiar with words; purely phonetic spellings can actually be jarring, if they look too strange.” You’re talking about phonetic spellings today, not 500 years ago. When much reading was, as far as we know, read aloud rather than silently. No, you can’t blame the printing press for the amazingly inconsistent spelling of English.
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Yeah, I made that point earlier and got well shouted down. For some reason it is very … debatable that English stands out in Europe as a mixed creole language mixing the orthographies of several sub- and superstrates. And the lack of a spelling reform ever…
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Read Bill Bryson’s wonderful book ‘Mother Tongue’ sometime, he takes great delight in exploring English and how its changed - he mentions American members of government complaining bitterly about the encroachment of English terms into American English, sometime after The American revolution!
Meanwhile snobs in England whine about the use of ‘Americanisms’ being used in English!
Whatever… 
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Modern French didn’t compete it’s way into becoming dominant over other languages. After the Revolution it was deliberately cultivated as a single national language to unify the French people in one tongue. To that end there was a national curriculum developed to teach the same French to all students, the deprecation of other languages and dialects. Even before that dominance the French language had an Academy devoted deciding what official French spelling and grammar was.
The original poster mentions how consistent Irish is. My understanding is that there was a big spelling reform implemented in Irish schools in the early 1950s and I have a hunch that’s why modern Irish has consistent spelling.
More broadly, my suspicion is that what makes English unusual is a political history in which no one who wanted spelling reform ever managed to have the power over enough English speakers to compel the adoption of their reforms. To my limited understanding those sort of reforms really took off once nationalism became a thing, and so postdates the US splitting off from Britain.
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A wikipediian reference especially for boingboingers.
William Shakespeare satirized the disparity between English spelling and pronunciation. In his play Love’s Labour’s Lost , the character Holofernes is “a pedant” who insists that pronunciation should change to match spelling, rather than simply changing spelling to match pronunciation. For example, Holofernes insists that everyone should pronounce the unhistorical B in words like doubt and debt .[9]
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I had an excellent education in grammar, and was taught that ‘off of’ is incorrect.
Proper spelling and usage makes writing easier to read and understand.
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FWIW, last night I watched the 2006 film adaptation of “As You Like It”, and paused the video at the following line, which I had to look up:
I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock- pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more newfangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey. I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry. I will laugh like a hyena, and that when thou art inclined to sleep.
I still don’t know what the boldfaced bit is supposed to mean.
(Incidentally, it is a really good performance of the play, if you can ignore the weird faux-Japanese stuff. Casting Opie’s daughter as Rosalind was inspired.)
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I think the thing to do is to look at the situation five centuries ago: the first bestseller was from a Johannes Gutenberg, with his bible. And soon thereafter, Martin Luther’s translation into German became even more of a hit. It’s why his version of German became the only accepted version. But being from one man, the spelling rules were more consistent.
Other nations at the time or later made spelling into a way of consolidating power. England was one of the first, so other rulers like Cardinal Richelieu saw language as a tool to do just that. The German states didn’t set a unified spelling until much later, in the 19th century.
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I’ve heard people claim that the Irish language may well split in the near future between the variety spoken in the Gaeltacht and the variety spoken by educated urbanites who speak English at home but learned Irish in school.
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Which basically just quotes textbook information (and has been updated a couple of times to keep up with ongoing research).
And stuff by Tom Lehrer, or They Might Be Giants, and lots of others.
I can see Brian May turning his PhD thesis (A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud) into a song that is both aesthetically pleasing and scientifically accurate.
Apparently 12th century Persian astronomers wrote poems about Zodiacal light, so why not a pop or rock song? (As long as it’s not a rock ballad, I’d have to take issue with that.)
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What, so this wasn’t it?
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This is the reason we’re all told in school (or later, in your case I suppose). But I have learned recently (while looking into something completely different) that it is actually more complicated.
Luther based his translation not only on his personal speech but also on the somewhat standardised official language used at courts all over northern and central Germany, the so called Meissner (or Sächsische) Kanzleisprache. This is a proto-standard German that at the time competed with the Southern German Maximilianische Kanzleisprache, which looks more like a written version of Bavarian or Austrian dialect. Of course the fact that the Sächsische Kanzleisprache won and the Maximilianische (later Oberdeutsche) lost out has a lot to do with Luther using it…
(There’s an argument to be made that the Southern German variant lived on in Standard Austrian, though)
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We may need some MC Hawking here:
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I know there are some different dialects and word disagreements and whatnot. But I suppose, more specifically, I was referring to the spelling and pronunciation patterns — all the “mh” / “bh” / “fh” sounds, and the fadas, etc. I can read something and fairly easily figure out how to pronounce it (according to the pronunciation I’ve learned, anyway). Now, that doesn’t mean I’m great at hearing/enunciating the differences in regional dialects, for example. Conversational languages are always a bit different anyway. But as far as literacy of the written word is concerned, I find it easier.
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If I’m being completely honest, this is the crux of it right here — sometimes my (and presumably others’) BB posts can be a bit sloppy because, errrr, they’re often written in a haste, as a brief, informal means of saying “Hey, check this thing out!” A robust editorial process would certainly catch a lot of these mistakes. But that would also take more time, which would cost more money, which ultimately defeat the purpose. Which is not to say I don’t take pride in what I write here, and strive to create a meaningful experience with each of my posts that’s representative of my work! But humans are still fallible.
So I mean like yeah, if I had gone back several hours after writing and carefully line-edited this post before sharing it, I probably would have found a more precious or eloquent way to phrase that which became “built off of.”
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