Modect Englich Cpelling Reformc

I've lamented something similar. I irrelevantly desired:

• 'c' to make the "sh" sound
• 'x' to make the "ch" sound
• Banish 'q'. Just replace "qu" with "kw".
• Remove "extra" sounds from letters:
  • 's' never makes the 'z' sound. If you want a 'z' sound, use 'z'.
  • Likewise 'g' never makes the 'j' sound.

So "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs" becomes "The kwik brown foks jumps over the lazy dogz." And "Choose wisely" becomes "Xooze wizely".

(I also wondered about replacing the "th" sound with a single letter such as the banished 'q', but it usually makes everything look illegible & awful.)

But in playing with this, I realized that there's still pointless redundancy. Why not convert "choose" to "xuz", and "wisely" to "waizly"? Isn't that better, despite it looking kind of terrible?

This later evolved into wondering why we don't just universally use the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) everywhere. I mean, how are we going to deal with the 12ish vowel sounds English forces to fit into five written letters? Wouldn't the IPA just be… better? Clearer?

But it slowly dawned on me: No. No, it wouldn't.

Consider "butter". In my native dialect it's pronounced "BUH-dr". In some English dialects it's "BUH-tah". I'm not sure where it's from, but I've sometimes heard people from some region pronounce it "BA-dah".

So the same word gets an IPA spelling that's totally differently depending on which dialect you're spelling it from.

If I remember right, this was an old problem in English. It wasn't until the printing press that English spelling got standardized.

So presumably the pronunciation of "butter" in some dialect really was something like "BOO-ter" — much like in German!

And that silly "k" in front of "knight", "knife", and "knoll" really was once pronounced. We just dropped it eventually in each case (apparently because England's French-speaking conquerors couldn't handle it?).

So I think part of what we're looking at here is a tradeoff between…

• …having spelling match pronunciation versus…
• …using the same spelling for the same word even across different dialects.

To the extent you go with the latter strategy, spelling is basically guaranteed to make less and less sense over time as language transforms.

(Fun related fact: This is what the hat accent in French is for. At some point the French went through a centralized spelling reform but wanted to encode in the written language that some letter (usually 's') had been dropped in the past. For instance, "to be" in French is "être", which has the same etymological root as Spanish "estar".)

All of which is to say:

I super relate…

…and I think this project is doomed.

c is actually an important, non-redundant letter:

"sass" becomes "cacc" ...

... "kick" becomes "xix"...

Any reason why sass would need a double c at the end, but the ck in kick just becomes one x?

exstra

Typo here

"c" makes the /s/ sound, "x" makes the /k/ sound

Making c and k more consistent I understand. Replacing s->c and k->x is a much larger change. It makes it difficult for someone who knows English spelling as it is now to adapt to the change^[1].

1. ^{^}

   Or at the very least, it's enough of a change that I can't quickly read words any more^[2]. In particular, s is a very common suffix, but c at the end of a word is generally a /k/ sound not a /s/ sound^[3], so my parser gets confused and I need to backtrack.

2. ^{^}

   Or worse, I can quickly read, but misread. I did not read the title as "reforms", plural. I read it as reform, singular.

3. ^{^}

   cynic, psychic, sac, arc, disc, etc.

I'm not sure there's really such a thing as incremental improvement here.

That is: if you publish a book whose "only" divergence from currently-standard English orthography is that it makes (say) the change you propose here, then you are publishing a Book With Weird Spellings, and the gap between a book in ordinary English and a book in English-with-weird-spellings is much bigger than the gap between any two specific sets of weird spellings.

No publisher is ever going to say "these changes are so modest that they won't seem like a big deal to readers and reviewers so f--- it, let's give it a try".

(Maaaaaybe a much smaller change could be incremental enough, though I'm having trouble thinking of plausible examples that aren't close to "this single word should be spelt differently", which I think one could get away with. But if you want to get from current standard English orthography to something much simpler or cleaner by a series of changes that small, I think it'll take you several hundred years. Which is to say, I think not coincidentally, you're looking at a rate of change comparable to the rate of organic change in the language's spelling and vocabulary.)

Words have different pronunciations in different dialects. Any attempt to "reform" spelling has to take this into consideration.

Typo in "exstra".

i'd say, use Spanish spelling rules for English words, and any sounds that do not have a Spanish equivalent should be phased out.

1. So you want X to have a sound it has in no other language...so that the very international words "taxi" and "kiosk" have to be respelt "taksi" and "xiosx" ?

2. Why not do something with "s"? Indeed why insist on one-letter-per-sound, in addition one-sound-per-letter?

3. Why the lack of interest in vowels?

4. Why the lack of interest in -gh and -ough? "("Cough", "hiccough", "through", "plough", thorough", etc)

5. Why the lack of interest in dialects?

I once worked on something similar. In my version I kept 'S' for the s sound, and 'C' made the sh sound. I think I used 'X' for one of the vowels.