What Makes a Good Language, and How Can Bad Languages Be Improved?

When learning a language, have you ever been confused by inconsistent grammatical rules, spelling rules, or any other part of how that language works?

I sure have. There are three strange phenomena in some languages that I consider nonsense. The first is when a language has an alphabet with letters that do not match a single sound and also has a sound with no single letter to represent it. For example, in English, "c" does the job of either a "k" or an "s", making "c" a pointless letter, and the "th" sound in English has to be made by two letters that should not make that sound when put together. The second is when a language has inconsistent spelling rules. Anyone learning English as a second language can recognize this inconsistency (just think of how many different sounds in words are represented by "o-u-g-h"!) The third is when a language gives gender to inanimate objects. English doesn't really do this anymore (except saying "she" when referring to a ship or sometimes a country) but Spanish, my second language, does this a lot, and so do many other languages (I'd like to know why the sky is male and the earth is female, among other things).

I don't like the nonsensical things I described above, so I have a mostly bad opinion about the languages that have the nonsense. In contrast, I say a "good" language is one in which these three principles are met. First, every sound, or "phoneme", has a corresponding letter, or "grapheme". Second, building off the first, a word is spelled the way it is pronounced. Will a word be spelled differently depending on an individual's accent? Sure, but I think that's okay. Third, no inanimate objects are gendered. No gendered pronouns is even better, given the silly "pronouns" craze happening in the English-speaking world.

Conveniently, I have over the years been able to read about differences between languages according to the principles I have mentioned. The first and second principles are essentially called "Phonemic orthography". As for the third, there is a list on Wikipedia that has classified hundreds of languages based on what "grammatical gender" they have. I haven't found a nice list of the languages that have ideal phonemic orthography, but I can usually figure out whether a language does by looking at the sounds the letters make.

It would take a long time to list off the languages that meet my criteria for a "good language", but examples that I like include Finnish (the only "good" language I know some of my ancestors spoke) and Dakota/Lakota (the language of the only people who have considered each of the places I have lived as part of their homeland). There are some languages, like Finnish which I just mentioned, that can be frustrating to English speakers because of the many declensions and conjugations that have to be accounted for, but I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing - just challenging.

As for the "bad" languages, if we could just reform their alphabets/writing systems, make spelling rules correspond accordingly, and find a genderless way of writing/speaking about inanimate objects, then they could be "good" languages. That's exactly what I decided to do to English, in fact, when I was in high school.

The Alphabet of Reformed English. Each sound is represented by one letter, and there is no such thing as uppercase or lowercase.

I had the idea of creating a new alphabet for English as a start in the summer of 2015. I then expanded my project of "Reformed English" to eliminate homophones as much as possible and also make sure each letter (and number) looks distinct. I actually wrote my class notes in Reformed English throughout the last three years of high school, hoping that others would catch on and spread my new language (or dialect - that was debatable) far and wide. No one ever did, and Reformed English basically fell by the wayside. Even I went back to standard English a few months into college.

Although I no longer use Reformed English, and I'm writing all these blog posts in standard English, a "bad" language, I think it would be nice to use the other "good" languages more. For example, it would be beneficial for anyone residing in Minnesota or the Dakotas to learn Dakota, Lakota, Cheyenne, or any other language of those tribes who have historically resided there, at least to understand some geographical names if not to speak to those who still speak the languages today. I am learning some Lakota words and expressions myself. Hoka hey! Time to learn a good language!