Just judging by this single thread alone:
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…And the printing press itself standardizing spelling.
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Speaking of understatements, I thought you might enjoy this:
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Sure, but the point is that there is still supposed to be one version of standard French that applies worldwide, and AFAIK it generally does in formal, academic and official contexts. In English, on the other hand, we use different spelling systems and have particular regional and national vocabulary quirks that sometimes reach all the way to the very highest registers.
The Académie française may be an exercise in futility when it comes to the way ordinary people write, especially outside France, but it still has some influence and can at least help settle debates. I know far less about how Spanish and German work, but would be surprised if they weren’t similar. (At the risk of talking out my ass, don’t German-speaking Swiss write in utterly bog-standard written German, yet speak a dialect barely intelligible to the Bavarians across the border?)
I was just pointing out that English doesn’t even have that level of attempted control from on high.
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Almost every statement here is problematic. Try traveling from Spain to Mexico to Florida, or even from south to central to northern Spain, and tell me there’s uniform agreement on how to pronounce.
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Do you mean it addresses thee, or me?
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How about “thee”?
How about “you”?
Many I speak with find “you” ambiguous because they use it for both singular and plural. But when asked why they don’t use a proper singular form which exists, they usually have no cogent reasoning beyond that doing so seems unfashionable to others.
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On how to pronounce, of course not. Such academies are about written language, and I did not even claim that everyone adopts their pronouncements, only that they are supposed to. Perhaps some Spanish-speaking countries opt out entirely (you tell me).
Is written Spanish not supposed to be standardized worldwide even if it isn’t in practice?
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Most of the time, mostly yes.
They can and occasionally do write Swiss German, but if you buy a random book or newspaper in Switzerland, then it is almost certainly written in Standard German that is very close to that of Germany.
Of course there are still differences between the Standard varieties, but they aren’t a huge deal (think BBC vs. CNN news).
It depends entirely on the context, but grammar varies widely, particularly once you get into Latin America. Even in Spain, acceptable grammar in discourse varies depending on the region, which translates to (colloquial more often than not) writing. Spanish does have a codified grammar, but not any more than English does, and it also can vary from country to country. Oftentimes those differences have roots in politics, as some countries have more or less impetus to separate themselves away from Spain.
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I’m actually not sure how common something like France’s official board is. That does give one consistent rubric for people to refer to accept or reject. And first Latin, then French were to original languages of diplomacy and science so that was certainly needed.
But I don’t know how truly universal that is. Do the Canadians rely on the French standard? Because the French Canadian dialect is distinct both written and spoken. In the US visa vis English there was historically a class divide. Private and upper class schools worked off British English standards (or even formal French), public or lower class off American ones.
Though English isn’t entirely without authorities. There’s no official board, at least not in the US. But the standard is set by various academics publishing, reviewing, and debating just like any other academic field. And multiple organizations publish fixedish standards, usually for specific uses or fields. So it’s softer than French, but hardly a free for all.
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I agree; when I moved to Scotland I was struck by how uncrowded it was, even in Edinburgh.
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You missed out on the pubs on a Football night, I take it.
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That just made the rest of town seem even fewer crowded,
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It has the Real Academia Epañola, a prescriptive body. It doesn’t surprise me that you suggest it’s widely ignored, especially by ordinary people in ordinary writing (like the Académie française), but the fact that it exists at all means that the language’s grammar is codified to a greater extent than English’s, because there is no prescriptive body whatsoever even attempting to codify English, and there never has been.
Or maybe not even really “you”, but “one”. As in “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” when what the phrase really should be is “one can lead a horse…” This is always an issue when discussing something that you (one) doesn’t want the other person to take personally. I always end up repeating the sentence over again with “one” just to make sure there’s no offense taken.
ETA: ah, I see someone already addressed this, that’s what I get for skipping large portions of the thread and reading up from the bottom.
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And when you insist on those special punctuations, the rest of us get odd strings of letters in web pages where someone insisted on special quotes or special dashes, get broken formatting in documents where someone insisted on fancy formatting, and crash word processors.
I use some special characters, like þ and ƕ in the Roman alphabet, but not special punctuation.
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You are correct, but I don’t really take the distinction very seriously. The result is more or less the same as in the US, where SAE is codified through a conglomerate of academic and private entities.
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Some of us have jobs where lives depend on exact, specific meanings of orders, instructions, and reports. Ambiguity is the Devil’s vollyball.
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Since some here are remarking upon differences between issues of grammar, syntax, and diction, I will mention for a moment one of the contemporary practices which I find most peevish.
That is the deliberate misspelling of words to replicate the effects of sloppy diction (or enunciation, or elocution - depending upon where one might suppose such decisions occur). As if it saves much time and effort to type things such as: prolly, doncha, wanna, dunno, gotta, gotcha, etc. I can empathize if some impediment prevents one from clearly speaking “don’t know”, but in written communication I find “dunno” irksome, as if their keyboard is missing some letters.
It seems to fit the same lexical trends which otherwise bothering me, which typically involves a stubborn refusal to clarify by creating new words, coupled with an eagerness to thoroughly bastardize existing words and their meanings. Often based upon deliberate laziness.
/r
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