4 ms·
I personally think there's a lot of room for improvements that would work in nearly all English dialects. The "ough" mess, for example, could stand some clean u
by rootbear 5y ago
I personally think there's a lot of room for improvements that would work in nearly all English dialects. The "ough" mess, for example, could stand some clean up. But in general, yes, there is too much variation in English around the world to "fix" it now.
- naniwaduni 5y agoYou're hitting the phonological analogue of Moravec's law: the "ough" mess is precisely the kind of thing that can't easily be simplified in a way that works across English dialects. It hits a wide swath of basic vocabulary that originally had a small range of slightly awkward pronunciations that diverged in descendant English. Different dialects don't split those pronunciations the same way. The real low-hanging fruit is getting the British to give up on those spellings that follow a dead branch of French ;-)