What are some words you feel sound more right in both the American and British English?
I use a mix of the two depending on the word.
For example, I stand by pronouncing words like “Amazon” with an “ehn” sound at the end over an “ohn” sound, prefer spelling colour and flavour with a u, and also like using double Ls for words like travelling. Also, it is “grey”. (British English)
However, I pronounce Z as “zee”and call them fries rather than chips.
There are also spellings where I sort of alternate between depending on my mood, such as “meter” vs “metre”and“airplane” vs “aeroplane”
Are there any words that you think sound better in British and American spellings/pronunciations?
I doubt that. Appetite comes during the meal as they say in my culture. Just start and you’ll be amazed how people would welcome ADEQUATE changes.
A silly colloquialism isn’t indicative of success. If you tell people to do something they don’t want to they’re not going to decide they actually like it later on.
There’s just no fucking way most Australians would decide to discard the current spelling of words in favor of the American spelling. I feel certain American’s feel the same about British spelling.
:)
All English dialects are a complete mess now. There won’t be Australian/British/American spelling. There will be a completely new spelling made by clever people, not by linguists. By people who can and want to make language bearable, not just clutching the status quo no matter what.
Look at Esperanto(before you might object about artificiality and widespread… Ukrainian also has that letter-sound bijection approach. Georgian as far as I know. I’m sure there are more) for example and see how convenient and logical can spelling be. Sometimes old things are so broken and outdated that you just throw them away and ask engineers to make a new thing. That’s why our cars don’t have 4 horse-based legs.
Sure mate. I’m sure the engineers will step in and fix all the language problems any day now.
Going by how ortography changes have gone in other languages, I doubt it.
Besides English, if English fix its ortography it’s going to become much harder to learn for speakers of other European languages - as confusing the pronunciation rules and exceptions are, they are caused by writing things similarly to other European languages while mangling the original pronunciation.
No, that’s a weak excuse. Nobody cares about the etymology of the word. It doesn’t help much for a Frenchman that 12 words in the whole English language are written the same way as in French. But ALL people (English native-speakers included) will profit from predictable spelling and pronunciation.
As a native Portuguese speaker I found it very useful when I started to learn English. And even nowadays having some form of “visual map” between English and Portuguese at least for more erudite words - which tend to be the ones that are shared between more languages - helps me write English better.
The similarities between English and German also ended up helping me learn German.