There have been many, many failed attempts at introducing phonetic/phonemic/simplified spelling systems for English. It’s a surprisingly hard problem both techn

There have been many, many failed attempts at introducing phonetic/phonemic/simplified spelling systems for English. It’s a surprisingly hard problem both technically and socially. For starters, we probably can’t split “th” into “þ” and “ð” because of words like “with”, where “wiþ” and “wið” are in free variation; even words like “thank”, which you might expect to be uniformly “þank”, show up as “ðank” in some dialects, sometimes also in free variation. English consonants are pretty consistent across dialects, with a few rare exceptions (like [x] in Scottish “loch”), but the vowels are all over the place phonetically. Even attempts to represent them phonemically (e.g. the 24 Standard Lexical Sets[1]) aren’t perfect across dialects because of the presence of different vowel mergers & splits, as well as one-off exceptions. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set