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I'm mostly against such an idea. While it's intuitive to think this is a good thing, I believe we take for granted a lot of the etymological information embedde
by SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
I'm mostly against such an idea. While it's intuitive to think this is a good thing, I believe we take for granted a lot of the etymological information embedded in our spellings.
That probably seems like an intellectual concern divorced from day-to-day language use, but I think we take for granted how easy it is to figure out a word's meaning from its spelling once one has a grasp of written English. Words we typically think of as being clearly related, and pronounced as basically similar sounds are actually vastly different in basic pronunciation, and, thereby, reforming spelling in this way would eliminate visual relationships between related words that are otherwise totally non-obvious.
And all this to perform a phonological mapping that would be out of date almost as soon as it was settled on. To say nothing of the actual practical concern of arriving at a consensus on which phonemes in which words should be spelt which way, what of the absolute deluge of different accents to be dealt with for instance. That's before we get to the part where now English speakers lose access to all pre-existing literature after about 2 generations. The longer you look at the proposal, the more counter-productive it obviously is.