this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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Dude, I'm trying to learn German and those goddamn articles are so infuriating. I wonder how difficult it would be for there to be a linguistic reform to make it simpler
Quite the statement for an English comment. English spelling is nonsensical and in desperate need of a major reform. RobWords even made the case for using runes again as it would probably fix a lot of issues already. The language simply isn't made for Latin letters.
But I don't want to make this a sole whataboutism comment. Each language poses it's own challenges. I will say that changing how roughly 100 million speak is easier said than done and would destroy a lot of culture. It would be much easier to force everyone to speak a different language entirely.
Personally I don't think it should or could be done at all. Unlike a spelling reform that English needs desperately and German had plenty of recently. There is nothing wrong with a language being complicated but there's plenty wrong with arbitrary spelling if you ask me.
Would love to hear more about why English isn't made for Latin letters
I don't know about Latin letters more generally, but at least the issue with the default Latin alphabet, there just aren't enough letters to represent the sounds used in English phonetically. The English language has between 14-25 vowels, depending on dialect and accent, and a further 24 consonants. When the Latin alphabet only has 26 letters, you're naturally going to run into situations where one letter has to represent multiple sounds. With that said, I don't see any reason, aside from the sheer cultural inertia of hundreds of years not doing so, why English couldn't address the issue with diacritics on different letters to achieve the necessary number of unique letters to represent all of the sounds found in English.