Post #77437
July 14, 2016, 12:49:12 AM
I actually like the u. Every time a product from America discards it (like pretty much every piece of technology that comes to our shores), I cringe just a little bit. There's no real logical defence for its continued use, it just feels weird to discard it.
That said, my annoyance boils down mostly to being too used to the British English I was taught in school. I think people would be better off if the entire English language, wherever it may be spoken, could undergo a massive change to reflect the way it sounds, not hang on to weird spellings that are actually quite indefensible. It just leads to confusion for those growing up in a digital age. I remember being quite annoyed at missing my 90% exam score for my essay in grade 11, because I spelt a word as "theater," instead of "theatre," which is the British variant. Who the fuck even cares? Some dead guy from 17th century London?
Miss Claassen, my teacher, was usually pretty open-minded, but she refused to give me that extra mark. University grammar is much less archaic. I wasn't even aware of the differing philosophies towards the subject until I got there.
EDIT: I remember being very confused when I learnt that the word "pronunciation" was actually pronounced, ironically, as "pronounciation." Do they realise how weird that sounds to someone who doesn't speak the language as their mother tongue?
In Afrikaans, words are spelt pretty much exactly the way they sound, with some notable exceptions, of course.
That's not to say we don't have to endure some stubborn snobbery from Afrikaans linguists, either. They seem to have forgotten that our language differs from Dutch because of the influence of many differing languages, and the fact that our ancestors' Malaysian slaves mangled regular Dutch when speaking to their masters' children. Children who then grew up to speak it pretty much the same way as the slaves. We began as a dynamic language, always evolving, and now some fossils stubbornly insist on a standard that just doesn't make sense. As the times change, so do the languages.
