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Serious proposals for the reform of English spelling were all the rage more than a century ago. Examples at the Internet Archive: Comstock's phonetic magazine

Serious proposals for the reform of English spelling were all the rage more than a century ago. Examples at the Internet Archive: Comstock's phonetic magazine (1846) https://archive.org/details/comstocksphoneti00unse https://archive.org/details/comstocksphoneti00unse Biografiz ov de prezidents ov de Yunited Stats, kompild bi F.G. Adamz (1856) https://archive.org/details/biografizovdepre00adam https://archive.org/details/biografizovdepre00adam A system of phonetic spelling, adapted to English (1889) https://archive.org/details/systemofphonetic00call https://archive.org/details/systemofphonetic00call The fonetic primer, offering the universal alfabet and the science of spelling (c1907) https://archive.org/details/foneticprimeroff00storrich https://archive.org/details/foneticprimeroff00storrich More here: https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Spelling+reform%22 https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Spelling+r... It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed while orthographic reforms in some other languages—Russian, German, Japanese, Chinese—succeeded, at least partially.

potiuper 5y ago
The last time English had a central language authority, i.e. l'Academie Francaise, was when words were first transcribed in Old English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board
andai 5y ago
Thanks for sharing these. I am a fan of Quikscript, which was specifically designed to be written by hand. Here is the original Quikscript Manual: https://www.quikscript.net/quikscript-manual.pdf https://www.quikscript.net/quikscript-manual.pdf Quikscript evolved from Shavian: >[George Bernard] Shaw placed in his will provisions instructing his executor to organize a world-wide competition to design an improved English alphabet. A British designer, Ronald Kingsley Read, who had corresponded extensively with Shaw for several years regarding just such an alphabet, was selected along with three other finalists as the winners of the competition. Read was chosen to design the final form of the alphabet. The "Shaw Alphabet" or "Shavian", as it is now generally known, was the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript
- olah_1 5y ago
  What do you think about Quickscript vs Shavian? Someone wrote a unicode doc[1] comparing the two. But sadly, only Shavian exists in Unicode today. That makes Quickscript almost a non-starter for me. One quick thought is that Quickscript merged together a couple of letters that are similar. It merged "err" and "array" and it also merged "ago" and "up". Merging err-array is probably fine, but in Shavian, "up" is stressed while "ago" is not. So a little something is lost in the up-ago merger. [1]: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20090-quikscript-shavian.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20090-quikscript-shavian.pd...
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  I think any attempt at replacing the latin alphabet is doomed to fail. However, a spelling reform could easily standardize on a few letter combinations and perhaps include a few diacritics and make it much easier to spell and read English. It's never going to be possible to have a phonetic writing system given the variety of accents, but a phonemic writing system may be achievable. English writing also has many constructs that are not phonetic in any accent, and never have been - such as the s in island.
  - olah_1 5y ago
    I think a totally new alphabet would be more easily accepted by people than a Latin spelling reform, which would see a ton of backlash around the uncanny valley and social stigmas. A new alphabet (like Hangul), could take a long time to adopt fully though, and there’s nothing wrong with that imo.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      Adopting a new alphabet has enormous costs, and it's very hard to imagine they can be outweighed by the benefits (unless perhaps you're adopting a different existing popular alphabet - probably Russian cyrilic or some Indian script being the only options, though perhaps a syllabary such as Hiragana would also be an option). The cost I'm talking about is losing the ability to read the vast amount of text that has been already written in the current alphabet. For the Latin alphabet in particular, which is by far the most used writing system in history, losing access to all text produced anywhere in Europe, the Americas and most of Africa for the last few hundred years or so would be very hard to make up for.
majewsky 5y ago
The late 1800s and early 1900s were also the peak of constructed-language movements like Esperanto and Volapük, which were riding on the assumption that there would be peace in our time if only we would all speak the same language and thereby see eye to eye. Also somewhat related, in the same timeframe, Japan was opening itself up after nearly three centuries of isolation and catching up with technological development. While new loanwords flooded into the language from all kinds of European languages, some scholars argued for replacing the traditional Japanese writing system with the Latin alphabet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#As_a_replacement_for_the_Japanese_writing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#As_a_... The proposal never won any majority support, but the government did end up doing a smaller reform: After WW2, several character forms were simplified and an official list of characters in common use with standardized pronounciations was published by the government as a baseline for the school syllabus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji
KineticLensman 5y ago
> It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed I think one reason is that phonetic spellings wouldn't work with some regional dialects. Consider 'bath' - many southern English people pronounce it as if it had an 'r'.

potiuper 5y ago

The last time English had a central language authority, i.e. l'Academie Francaise, was when words were first transcribed in Old English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

andai 5y ago

Thanks for sharing these. I am a fan of Quikscript, which was specifically designed to be written by hand. Here is the original Quikscript Manual: https://www.quikscript.net/quikscript-manual.pdf https://www.quikscript.net/quikscript-manual.pdf Quikscript evolved from Shavian: >[George Bernard] Shaw placed in his will provisions instructing his executor to organize a world-wide competition to design an improved English alphabet. A British designer, Ronald Kingsley Read, who had corresponded extensively with Shaw for several years regarding just such an alphabet, was selected along with three other finalists as the winners of the competition. Read was chosen to design the final form of the alphabet. The "Shaw Alphabet" or "Shavian", as it is now generally known, was the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript

olah_1 5y ago
What do you think about Quickscript vs Shavian? Someone wrote a unicode doc[1] comparing the two. But sadly, only Shavian exists in Unicode today. That makes Quickscript almost a non-starter for me. One quick thought is that Quickscript merged together a couple of letters that are similar. It merged "err" and "array" and it also merged "ago" and "up". Merging err-array is probably fine, but in Shavian, "up" is stressed while "ago" is not. So a little something is lost in the up-ago merger. [1]: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20090-quikscript-shavian.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20090-quikscript-shavian.pd...
tsimionescu 5y ago
I think any attempt at replacing the latin alphabet is doomed to fail. However, a spelling reform could easily standardize on a few letter combinations and perhaps include a few diacritics and make it much easier to spell and read English. It's never going to be possible to have a phonetic writing system given the variety of accents, but a phonemic writing system may be achievable. English writing also has many constructs that are not phonetic in any accent, and never have been - such as the s in island.
- olah_1 5y ago
  I think a totally new alphabet would be more easily accepted by people than a Latin spelling reform, which would see a ton of backlash around the uncanny valley and social stigmas. A new alphabet (like Hangul), could take a long time to adopt fully though, and there’s nothing wrong with that imo.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Adopting a new alphabet has enormous costs, and it's very hard to imagine they can be outweighed by the benefits (unless perhaps you're adopting a different existing popular alphabet - probably Russian cyrilic or some Indian script being the only options, though perhaps a syllabary such as Hiragana would also be an option). The cost I'm talking about is losing the ability to read the vast amount of text that has been already written in the current alphabet. For the Latin alphabet in particular, which is by far the most used writing system in history, losing access to all text produced anywhere in Europe, the Americas and most of Africa for the last few hundred years or so would be very hard to make up for.

majewsky 5y ago

The late 1800s and early 1900s were also the peak of constructed-language movements like Esperanto and Volapük, which were riding on the assumption that there would be peace in our time if only we would all speak the same language and thereby see eye to eye. Also somewhat related, in the same timeframe, Japan was opening itself up after nearly three centuries of isolation and catching up with technological development. While new loanwords flooded into the language from all kinds of European languages, some scholars argued for replacing the traditional Japanese writing system with the Latin alphabet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#As_a_replacement_for_the_Japanese_writing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#As_a_... The proposal never won any majority support, but the government did end up doing a smaller reform: After WW2, several character forms were simplified and an official list of characters in common use with standardized pronounciations was published by the government as a baseline for the school syllabus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji

KineticLensman 5y ago

> It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed I think one reason is that phonetic spellings wouldn't work with some regional dialects. Consider 'bath' - many southern English people pronounce it as if it had an 'r'.