5 ms·
This strongly reminds me of a bit of humor attributed (perhaps erroneously) to Mark Twain. --- For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped
by sudobash1 3y ago
This strongly reminds me of a bit of humor attributed (perhaps erroneously) to Mark Twain.
---
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.
- avgcorrection 3y agoI would take absolutely any phonetic spelling of English over the current spelling of English.
- aidenn0 3y agoIndeed; I'm a rhotic speaker but would even take a non-rhotic phonetic spelling over what we have today (things like cot/cart being spelled the same couldn't be more confusing that the current orthography)
- pm215 3y agoIf you go for the Southern English accent as the base for your non-rhotic phonetic spelling you don't even have to sacrifice distinguishing cot and cart -- they're different vowels because we don't have the father/bother merger :-)
- aidenn0 3y agoOh, I forgot about the father/bother merger because it is darn-near universal in the US. My mom is from one of the few places in the US that was non-rhotic and had avoided the caught-cot merger[1], thus resulting in "caught" and "cot" not being homophones, but "cot" and "cart" being homophones. 1: Past-tense because many kids seem to speak much closer to middle-american than even 20 years ago.
- imglorp 3y agoBernard Shaw famously supported spelling reform, first merely reworking the standard orthography and later, in the form of the phonetic alphabets Shavian and later Quikscript by Kingsley Read. They're both obviously more consistent than Latin alphabet writing, and also often shorter so they might count as shorthand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript
- cpfohl 3y agoWhose phonology? English is a delightfully diverse language, spoken by delightfully diverse people!
- avgcorrection 3y agoThat's why I said any! Australian, Anglo-Sikh, doesn't matter to me.
- dang 3y agoAs HN user D-Coder pointed out a few years ago, that joke wasn't Twain but an author in the September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507 More links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468884.
- sudobash1 3y agoThanks dang. I've always been pretty suspicious of the attribution to Twain. Nice to know where it actually came from.
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