Should some spellings be removed?

[Lilani]

-snip-

I think if you remove the rules and "proper" usages of language, it causes everything to be ambiguous. Without standards of quality, it's hard to determine what is proper. And the last thing that would help us be more clear is to allow everyone to make up the rules of spelling and grammar according to what is difficult for them. Legal documents and instructions would be particularly hard to nail down.

What Stephen Fry is talking about in that video is not changing the rules to conform to misspellings. It's about allowing room for changes in the language, but in the sense of new words or usages of words. The difference being he wants to encourage changes that add new words and meanings to the language that cannot more efficiently be expressed by any other word. For example, the way "googling" has become the standard verb for using a search engine. Using whatever you want to when it comes to "which, were and where" contributes nothing to usage or clarity. In fact, it only makes things more unclear.

 

[FoolKiller]

I would love to hear you pronounce them, I don't mean record yourself for this exact purpose but just in general life. Record yourself saying these words in normal conversations and listen to them back, I can pretty much guarantee that unless you are rubbing elbows with the queen of England that you will pronounce every were, there and which all the same way.

No. I always pronounce them differently. I mean always. As does everyone I know. It's just how they're pronounced.

"Where" is supposed to sound like air.
"Were" is supposed to sound like fur.
"We're" is supposed to sound like weird.

Sweet. I can sit back and relax. I was going to come to your defense but you've got it covered.

I think that just even words like there and their should have their distinct spellings. While reading I like being able to, you know, just read the sentence rather than decipher its meaning.

Now if the OP would like to take up arms against language, then get the powers that be to fix the mess that is its/it's. The stupid apostrophe is supposed to either be a contraction (where's = where is) or mean possession (Bob's cat means the cat that belongs to Bob). When dealing with it the rules change. It's only means it is. Its is the version that means possession. WTF???

 

[Odbarc]

I heard/read somewhere that the amount of words people know today is like half or a quarter of what people USED to know.

Could you imagine knowing 4X as many English words as you do now? I love my vernacular.

Is that words we know total or we only use a quarter of the words they used back then? I'm sure we only use a quarter of the words used back then because we created new words, but if you mean they had 4x (or even double) the vocab I would be a lot more skeptical.

A time when every person talked like Shakespeare? Language was a very prominent thing for some time. You needed to know your language to write love letters to women or they wouldn't marry you... probably.

All I know is the difference is significant. And I'm not talking about there being less or more words in general. I'm talking about the average persons vercabulary being much greater than it is today. With the dumbing down of words like 'u' and 'ur' and garbage words people use in texts.