Correct Pronunciation

[robb_k]

While I agree with you that American influence is advancing relentlessly [as British influence once was, in a different way, including giving birth to the US], when you talk about specific changes it’s often more complicated.

There are many cases where British English changed after the American Revolution and the Americans kept an old form.

Yes, I understand that languages are living entities, and change as they are spoken. My problem is not so much languages changing over the decades, but mainly being changed it ways that makes them less understandable, or less useful in communication from one person to another. I am all for US, Canadian, and UK English changing their official spellings every so often [[75 to 100 years or so), as we have done during my lifetime in The Netherlands and Denmark. English is still using spellings that match pronunciations as old as from The Old English period from 800-1050. Luckily for me, I understand Dutch and Frisian, so I understand why "enough" is spelt the way it is and from where a lot of other ancient spellings come. But, it would be simpler and nicer for English learners, if enough could be spelt thusly: "enuff", and there wouldn't be 8 different sounds resulting from the amalgam of the letters, "ough". And the sound, "ow" as in the word, cow, would ALWAYS be spelt: "ow", except when it would need to be stressed more. Then we would add another "w". Spanish is so user -friendly, because the rules are such that once the learner learns those phonetics, he or she can spell almost any word despite never having seen it. Dutch [[thanks to the changes introduced soon after WWII, and the more recent ones [[changing "sch" to "s" when the old sound has dropped out of the word), is also extremely user-friendly as far as spelling goes.

I just don't like having lots of adjectives dropping out of use, making it more difficult to describe gradations of degree of qualities, or phrases changing in meaning to the exact opposite of their original, logical meaning, and spitting in the eye of logic, such as "I COULD care less!", "instead of I couldn't care less!", just because a lot more people are lazy, and don't want to have to pronounce one more one-syllable word, or they are too ignorant to know that it makes no sense logically, or they HATED having to learn grammar in school, and are deliberately saying it incorrectly, to act rebelliously against the society that forced that unnecessary work upon them, or because they just feel that speaking the phrase correctly is not important to The World's existence or Mankind's history [[and, of course they are correct in that belief).

But, I believe there are wayyyyyy too many misunderstandings between people that lead to strife; and degrading language as a communication tool just enhances that problem.