Ask HN: How to Start a Language Reform?

[slmjkdbtl]

If I'm unsatisfied with a certain aspect of a language I speak, like English in America, and I have a proposal to make that part better, is there a way I can do that?

Who owns English?

How to propagate the change?

Is it legal to completely change a meaning of word in people's mind via internet and memes, without the permission of any authority?

[mikewarot]

Languages are collectively owned, and change all the time. Here in the US, some people deliberately try to change the meanings of words at a pace that the rest of the people are unable to keep up with, and encounter heavy resistance for doing so. In many cases, their efforts are counterproductive in the extreme.

If you want to change any societally owned thing, your only effective route is through persuasion and example.

[togaen]

When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.

With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtle for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.

[jepler]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_the_neologism_%22... "Santorum" may be an instructive example.

[rurban]

Just tell your children. They will pick it up and spread it amongst their friends.

Their's no authority, it's a living thing and changes all the time.

[garbagecoder]

Fire people who don’t use the new grammar. Apparently, this works.

[manx]

What would you like to change?