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Legend refuses to let the man dictate what 'grammar' and what 'the correct word' is dictate their writing
(lemmy.world)
Also, please be civil this person was actually pretty chill about getting totally destroyed for this crazy take. I mostly just wanted to document this moment.
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:
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":
No more ambiguity.