It's absolutely a language.

English fits all 3 of those definitions.
Not to mention that it is an established system, and the costs would be tremendous. All software would have to be rewritten (OK, not all, but a lot), all signs would need to be remade, all labels redone, all documents reprinted. This is not something that could be easily done gradually either - that would necessitate redoing all these things not just once, but many times (once for each slight change made). It's impractical, expensive, and unnecessary. I just don't see any need, purpose, or point.

Finally, why does it matter how English originated? That has no bearing on it's current useage or any changes proposed. We may just have to agree to disagree on this one...

Countable?

At least that's the rule I tend to use, if I can count them it's "fewer", if not it's "less".

And incidentally if I'm marking a specific phrase or word with quotation marks, I leave punctuation outside since the punctuation is not part of what I'm writing about. I know this probably breaks a couple of rules.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Just to let you see the difference: "ß" is the sz ligature, "β" is a beta. Completely different letters, right?

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Only in the US. In England, you're fine.

Oh, which brings up another point. If we're going to redo spelling, simplifying it is not where we ought to start. Unifying it is. The British superfluous "u," for example. I use it about half the time, because I rather like how it looks, but spellcheck hates me for it. (Of course, it also hates me for using words it's never heard of before, but hey.) I mean, for heaven's sake, the British and the Americans can't agree whether periods go inside or outside of quotation marks, and we're supposed to believe it's possible to develop a revised but unified spelling system?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I just find it quite hilarious how English borrows words from other languages without changing the spelling. This is more noticeable in British English than American English. But then, I'm easily removed.

Perhaps I should have mentioned that when I said gradually I was thinking of perhaps one small change per decade at most, encouraging people to adopt it and giving up and trying something else if it doesn't catch on. Idealy most people would never really notice. I'm not in favour of trying to control the evolution of a language, just giving the occaisonal prod in a helpful direction and occaisonally give it a boast in the right direction. I'm a bit of a bigot when it comes to English and I'd like to see it used in the future instead of dying out as it is likely too. I see gradual simplification of some spelling as one way to help prevent this.

This kind of change happens anyway, though, without direct interference. It's just part of the evolution of language. Try reading books from a hundred years ago, then two hundred, then three hundred. They are completely different from the language used in books today. The more you go back, the more it changes. Spelling changes, grammatical rules change, and pronounciation changes (or else people in the 1700's were incapable of writing rhyming poems).

For instance, we have the word "orientate" now. It's completely superfluous, but it's replacing "orient" almost everywhere. In twenty years, it will be more acceptable than its ancestor. I don't know why it's become popular, but I suspect that, in context, it just sounds better to many people. More official, perhaps.

Not all changes make the language more complex. Many simplify it, such as when words go out of style. Others simply make modifications, like the negative connotations that the word "regime" has recently taken on. However, it's all a matter of taste and opinion, and in order to direct the evolution of language, you'd also need to direct public opinion. It's a difficult thing to do, and usually such changes only make the language more complex, rather than less so.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

That's funny--I thought English was one of the fastest-growing languages in the world, and in fact was passing on huge amounts of words to other languages.

Oh, wait--that's because it is.

One of English's greatest strengths, historically speaking, is its ability to adopt bits of other languages. This goes back a thousand years and more, to the merger of Old English, with its Anglo-Saxon roots, with . . . well, bits of everything. The Normans' language, most obviously, but also the Celtic languages. Heck, the Angles and the Saxons had separate languages once!

We don't actually preserve spelling verbatim most times. For one thing, we can't, from a lot of languages. Either they use different alphabets or they're from nonliterate cultures, such as many of the languages native to the American continents. (Actually, all languages native to the American continents fit into one of those two categories.) Sometimes, the spelling's actually simplified. Often, the pronunciation is butchered--or just flat anglicized, such as the transition between many Spanish words. (The example I'm thinking of is "pineapple," but I don't know how to do a tilde to write the Spanish properly.)

Then again, since there are more words in English than in any other language--twice as many as a lot of other languages--one change a decade is such a slow rate of change as to produce no realistic difference to the language at all.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Cut-ñ-paste?
If in Windows there's Character Map or you could get SC UniPad, that'll get you every character defined in unicode.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

If you're going to reform the spelling of English (not likely), one thing you should do is get rid of those illogical rules for the placement of quote marks you have in American English. No one else uses them, and they confuse the heck out of us foreigners.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Yeah, Arneb had already warned me of that. However they´re not 'completely' different. Some font styles feature beta with a short 'appendage', exactly like the sz of the old German alphabet. And I´ve seen other people confusing them too. But I presume I was right about the pronounce of eu, ei, ch [that was the core of my reasoning]

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If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

So Monique is pronounced Moh-nee-kwee?

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Yes, and 1 month is fewer months than 2 months, but it's also less time than 2 months.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

If someone is up to such a gargantuan task, put the effort where it will matter - such as revising our tax codes and laws.

Don't waste the effort of piddling around with our language for the sake of being able to check off an item on the political correctness to-do list.

BTW, just want to make sure I've got this straight:

<> My grammar sucks.
<> My spelling sucks.
<> My grammar and spelling suck.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Yup.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

I don't see why a spelling reform would have anything to do with political correctness. Unless you decided to include some politically correct changes in it...

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I think it's all about political correctness. After all, we can't have stupid people revealing their stupidity just because they can't spell their native language. I mean, come on. That would hurt their fragile self-esteem.

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"It was a crime of passion! Not premeditated dentistry!"

Here's a problem with language simplification. Language is not just efficient communication. It is also an art form. The more you simplify it, the more you remove its subtlety. That would be akin to reducing all visual fine art to stick figures and engineering drawings.

I graduated from college with a pretty decent vocabulary and ability to write creatively. Then I worked through my 20's writing manuals (civilian contract) for the U.S. Air Force. We had to write to an 8th grade level, and after a decade of training that a six-syllable word should be replaced by a two-syllable one whenever possible, my creative writing skills suffered drastically. I've never fully regained them. Let's be cautious with simplification, even when only spelling is considered.

Luckmeister

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Why the avatar grin? I'm watching my favorite actress/model through my 4D glasses -- it sure beats looking at a tesseract.

Exactly!

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"