A problem with all English spelling reform is that it is often intended to be phonetic and usually favours the pronunciation of the person proposing the change another is that it makes homophones also homonyms.
Where I come from in the South West of England bath has a long a and so does castle but in the North East they both have short a. Which one should the orthography reflect? What about house? Pronounced almost to rhyme with mice in some quarters and moose in others.
What do you do about Shrewsbury when even the locals don't all agree on how it is pronounced? Will Scots get to spell the name of a large aquatic mammal as hwale to more closely match the pronunciation? One positive change might be that in England the word wales would be reserved for the animals and we would all start referring to the country as Cymru.
If spelling reformers want to spell words differently then they should just do it the way that English has done for centuries, just do it. If you prefer to write labor rather than labour then do so. If you would rather write jeeny than genie go ahead. After all as mentioned in the article there is no English Academy to tell you not to. If others agree then the written language will adjust.
My Norwegian teacher was adamant that Norwegian is pronounced as written despite knowing perfectly well that almost every valley here has a different accent or even dialect. Norway gets away with it only by declaring that the two official forms are merely standardised written Norwegian; no one actually speaks bokmål or nynorsk.
This is a good start, albeit I don't share the author's enthusiasm for eliminating letters that are used in sounding out the word. I would rather we focus on popular words and remove any ambiguity in how someone would speak them if they read it for the first time. I think it is essential for the future of English that people communicating online (using text) can avoid the ambiguity in how the receiver would read and speak their message. For that reason, truncating smaller words to use fewer letters while retaining how they sound is far more valuable.
As an example, bothering with miscellany is a waste of time. Almost no one uses it when writing a tweet or a text message. It's a bigger bang for buck to change words like through to thru or knife to nyfe and so on.
If they really want to reform English spelling, they should write a spell-checking library in every major programming language that builds on every major platform and can be easily integrated into chat, message, and mobile keyboard applications which defaults to “English 20xx”, but still supports default English.
All it would need to do is not highlight “improved spellings” as incorrect in “English 20xx” mode at the start. Then it could slowly turn the knob as they see increasing usage.
If you want to do even more then you can implement speech-to-text and transcript generators that default to “English 20xx”.
But which English 20xx to use? The one that spells the phenomenon of our eyes rendering electromagnetic radiation as "colour" or the one that renders the same as "color"?
Grey or gray?
Is the building adjacent to the one across from you "kitty-corner", "katty-corner", "kitty-korner" or "katty-korner"?
Is the small freshwater crustacean a crayfish, crawfish, or crawdad?
Says who, mind you? Why would facebook adopt some FOSS English 20xx when it could implement it's own for advertising alignment purposes? What are the odds that google and facebook both land on identical implementations?
What do "regular" writing systems do when different dialects use different sounds for the same word? Do different people write the same word differently? Or are people forced to confirm to a standard dialect? Both seem bad.
People learn a deterministic way to sound a word at school, same for everyone. The very fact of having that as part of education tends to stabilise the language to a degree: I can read 16 century poems and stuff sounds the same and rhymes perfectly.
Most local variations and accents will deviate in semi standard ways: For example, southern spaniards will usually use the same sound for S and C (which in Spain's Spanish is the famous 'lispy s' sound). So in general people are aware of what is part of the standard and what is a local characteristic.
Our educative system makes a point of those variations explicitly not being 'wrong', but sometimes in practice there are ideological debates about this stuff: For example, people might self police in media by adapting to the standard, which in turn draws criticism for "reneging of their identity").
"Queue" is not pronounced as the sound that the 'q' in "quick" or "quack" makes.
My favorite is "ghoti"[1] which is pronounced as "fish" because of:
gh, pronounced /f/ as in enough /ɪˈnʌf/ or tough /tʌf/;
o, pronounced /ɪ/ as in women /ˈwɪmɪn/;
ti, pronounced /ʃ/ as in nation /ˈneɪʃən/ or motion /ˈmoʊʃən/.
A fun idea but I think someone that learns the language and invests enough time into it would find no reason to have the "f" removed from sufficient, they just accept it as it is and never think twice about it
But the large majority of texts is now typed, not handwritten. I'd optimize a writing system for fast, easy, error-resistant reading. The Latin script reads easier than this, despite its known problems, maybe because Quickscript lacks the 27 centuries of refinement.
If I were to pick an existing script, that would be either Hangul or Tengwar (with vowels). Tengwar already has an English mode, and Hangul would likely need a few adjustments, following its general principles.
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Where I come from in the South West of England bath has a long a and so does castle but in the North East they both have short a. Which one should the orthography reflect? What about house? Pronounced almost to rhyme with mice in some quarters and moose in others.
What do you do about Shrewsbury when even the locals don't all agree on how it is pronounced? Will Scots get to spell the name of a large aquatic mammal as hwale to more closely match the pronunciation? One positive change might be that in England the word wales would be reserved for the animals and we would all start referring to the country as Cymru.
If spelling reformers want to spell words differently then they should just do it the way that English has done for centuries, just do it. If you prefer to write labor rather than labour then do so. If you would rather write jeeny than genie go ahead. After all as mentioned in the article there is no English Academy to tell you not to. If others agree then the written language will adjust.
My Norwegian teacher was adamant that Norwegian is pronounced as written despite knowing perfectly well that almost every valley here has a different accent or even dialect. Norway gets away with it only by declaring that the two official forms are merely standardised written Norwegian; no one actually speaks bokmål or nynorsk.
As an example, bothering with miscellany is a waste of time. Almost no one uses it when writing a tweet or a text message. It's a bigger bang for buck to change words like through to thru or knife to nyfe and so on.
All it would need to do is not highlight “improved spellings” as incorrect in “English 20xx” mode at the start. Then it could slowly turn the knob as they see increasing usage.
If you want to do even more then you can implement speech-to-text and transcript generators that default to “English 20xx”.
Grey or gray?
Is the building adjacent to the one across from you "kitty-corner", "katty-corner", "kitty-korner" or "katty-korner"?
Is the small freshwater crustacean a crayfish, crawfish, or crawdad?
Says who, mind you? Why would facebook adopt some FOSS English 20xx when it could implement it's own for advertising alignment purposes? What are the odds that google and facebook both land on identical implementations?
People learn a deterministic way to sound a word at school, same for everyone. The very fact of having that as part of education tends to stabilise the language to a degree: I can read 16 century poems and stuff sounds the same and rhymes perfectly.
Most local variations and accents will deviate in semi standard ways: For example, southern spaniards will usually use the same sound for S and C (which in Spain's Spanish is the famous 'lispy s' sound). So in general people are aware of what is part of the standard and what is a local characteristic.
Our educative system makes a point of those variations explicitly not being 'wrong', but sometimes in practice there are ideological debates about this stuff: For example, people might self police in media by adapting to the standard, which in turn draws criticism for "reneging of their identity").
"Queue" is not pronounced as the sound that the 'q' in "quick" or "quack" makes.
My favorite is "ghoti"[1] which is pronounced as "fish" because of:
gh, pronounced /f/ as in enough /ɪˈnʌf/ or tough /tʌf/; o, pronounced /ɪ/ as in women /ˈwɪmɪn/; ti, pronounced /ʃ/ as in nation /ˈneɪʃən/ or motion /ˈmoʊʃən/.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/quikscript.htm
And the excellent official Quikscript manual:
https://www.omniglot.com/pdfs/quikscriptmanual.pdf
The guy who invented it is called Read. Nomen est omen!
---
See also, re: Reforming the English lexicon: Uncleftish Beholding
https://msburkeenglish.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010...
If I were to pick an existing script, that would be either Hangul or Tengwar (with vowels). Tengwar already has an English mode, and Hangul would likely need a few adjustments, following its general principles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengwar
Rough and tough do rhyme...
"Dolton" was an amusing pseudonym. See this thread from a few years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507
It actually looks pretty good. It's written for comical effect, but it highlights nicely how _bad_ English orthography is.