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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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For example, it's become very common to put question marks at the ends of statements to indicate uncertainty

I do this in text conversations. It takes the place of a certain tone of voice, and is just useful. It's just language changing, 2000s english has a number of errors by the standards of 1900s english, which has errors by the standards of 1800s english, and so on and so on in an often continuous process until eventually it's mutually incomprehensible.

No one seems to know how to spell led, no one, all right, or its

I think people, especially dumber people, have made these sorts of mistakes for a long time, but 1) we see a lot more writing by average people than we did in the past due to the internet, and 2) typing is a lot faster and more casual than writing with a pen so people care less about little mistakes.

Also, though, english spelling conventions are dumb. Why not just have a simpler, understandable correspondence between phonemes and spelling? Like, chinese characters were horrendously complicated until they were Simplified, and there's still a lot more complexity there than is necessary, but it was a net benefit.

Compare a newspaper article or even worse a scientific journal article from today versus 70 years

Not sure about the news, but there is a lot more science being done today than there was 70 years ago, so the % that are high human capital necessarily decreases.

Also, though, english spelling conventions are dumb. Why not just have a simpler, understandable correspondence between phonemes and spelling? Like, chinese characters were horrendously complicated until they were Simplified, and there's still a lot more complexity there than is necessary, but it was a net benefit.

In law, at least, convention is important. The placement of commas can decide cases. I think this is where written English succeeds, because it's so precise, from the choice of words to the grammar.

There's a reason why there's a plethora of controlled versions of English.