[…] 43% in favour of rejoining the bloc, compared with 40% who want to stay out. But once the 18% who say they don’t know are taken out, 52% back EU membership with 48% opposing it […]

That’s not a “majority of voters”, that’s a “majority of people who report to know what they want”. These are not the same populations.

That was incredible. Can’t wait for ground footage of the ship landing burn.

Honestly it seems like a sensible change. If I’m not mistaken Frankfurt Hbf is also a head station and you lose a ton of time because of it.

These are very valid arguments that can’t be reduced to a lack of habit. Thanks for sharing your perspective!

Are you american? If so, the “unwieldy and too long” is probably because you’re not used to it. I’m not used to letter-size and it seems weirdly short and unnecessarily wide but I know it’s because I’m just not used to it.

Looks like it does the job perfectly. Thanks!

Does anyone know the artist?

That’s one symptom of car-dependency!

If we had proximity shops minutes away by foot, we wouldn’t do one giant grocery weekly with 30 min commute one way. We’d just buy what we need just passing by.

We need a comedy necromancy community

Source: False Knees

I made this timeline back in the day.

I tried to swap the awful colormap… I don’t know if it’s any better, I hope so!

https://images2.imgbox.com/fa/00/CEWRzviK_o.png

Edit: ah, the rivers were already blue…

Thank you for your insightful reply and for engaging in discussion!

I absolutely agree with your stance on standardization. I’m confronted directly to this issue with the Walloon language. There has been no standardization and the current “Feller” orthographic consensus is to mix analogy to French (to facilitate the intuitive writing by French speakers), and phonetics (every author writes with its personal pronunciation). So there’s a gazillion ways of writing the same word and it has definitely been an issue for the language survival. Standardization is useful because it does include some amount of abstraction so that the same orthography can be used by speakers of different regions with their local variation of the language.

That being said, there is an actual effort for standard orthographies to agree with phonetics. The orthographies of standardized languages such as German (last reform in 1996), Dutch (last reform in 2006), Portuguese (last reform in 1990) have been modified and updated so that they reflect changes that took place in the pronunciations and simplify obsolete rules. French has actually a very phonetic orthography from the… 12th century. The last in-depth reform of French orthography was 1835, with a small-scale rectification in 1990 that’s been largely opposed. As for English, the reforms are even rarer with a single successful reform in 1828 for American spelling. That’s what I meant by conservatism. I wouldn’t call German orthography conservative at all, to the contrary.

In the case of “then/than”, like I said there’s no need to reform their spelling because they are not homophones for everyone. I do however think that their use is significantly different so that homonyms wouldn’t alter understanding. Difficulties would mainly arise from habit. In the example given by @Schal330@lemmy.world:

“I’d rather eat cake than have a pineapple up the bum” and “I’d rather eat cake then have a pineapple up the bum”

are theoretically already pronounced identically by some native speakers. Why is there no misunderstanding orally? I guess either the intonation that can be marked by a comma, or the addition of “and”:

“I’d rather eat cake, then have a pineapple up the bum”.

“I’d rather eat cake and then have a pineapple up the bum”.

No more ambiguity.

“I’m used to it” is a pretty lousy excuse for an orthographic system. It’s the very definition of conservatism.

And yeah, you raise a valid point! In standardized languages, there is a linguistic effect of “speak like printed” but that’s emergent and not the initial purpose of orthography. The goal of orthography is to transpose a spoken language to writing.

This was actually a problem faced by German orthographists. The letter ‘ä’ was being pronounced /ɛː/ even if the vowel was not part of German phonology. That’s where the term “speak like printed” comes from (“sprechen wie gedruck”).

More info here.

Oh, I know the English rules very well, and those of French, and those of Dutch, and those of Portuguese, and those of German.

Of all the orthographies that I know, French and English are the dumbest by far, because they are the most conservative. It’s not because you struggled to learn that you should feel superior to others. Pride in a dumb orthographic system can only be understood through elitism.

I know that the words are different and have different meanings, and I know that some speakers pronounce them differently so I wouldn’t change the orthography now.

My point is: let’s not be so conservative that orthography has to be fixed forever. If they become homophones, the orthography could change and they could be homonyms like so many others exist.

You know, they’ve got a very valid point. Language is spoken before it is written and it changes with time. I’ve got the opinion that orthography should be subordinate to pronunciation. If ‘then’ and ‘than’, historically pronounced differently, become homophone, they could be written the same.

I’m tired of English and French orthographies being so conservative, writing words like they were pronounced hundreds of years ago…

Basically the rest of the maze

😢

Entschuldigung, ich lehre Deutsch. Was bedeudet “Bogen nutzen”?