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Worth mentioning that a spelling reform like Twain's would mean that every accent would need to be spelled differently, or the sounds wouldn't match for most sp

Worth mentioning that a spelling reform like Twain's would mean that every accent would need to be spelled differently, or the sounds wouldn't match for most speakers. It's quite possible that some British dialects would be very hard to read for some Americans and vice versa, even if they were used to the system for their own dialect. For instance, Twain spells "after" like "aafte", but in my accent I would probably spell it "afdr". Twain has also run in to the problem that spoken English has far more vowels then written English does. He uses "ai" in both "minds"/"maindz" and "replace"/"riplais", but presumably they represent different sounds. Presumably OP's system has the same problems with the dialects of Chinese, now that I think about it. Although I know very little about Chinese unfortunately (only what I know now from a few seconds of googling).

livueta 3y ago
An amusing example of this is the character Bascule in Banks' Feersum Endjinn, who narrates like so: > Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Egrates the ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u 1/2 a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith. I personally enjoyed it and never had much trouble figuring it out, but know people who found it unpleasant and incomprehensible.
Hasnep 3y ago
My Chinese knowledge is limited, but I believe that words in Chinese would not be affected by accent in the same way. This is because even though, for example, in the Taiwanese accent sh is pronounced like s, "shi" and "si" are still "spelt" differently and consistently when using a phonetic writing system like pinyin or zhuyin. There are still individual words that are pronounced differently in different regions, but that's not related to accent.

livueta 3y ago

An amusing example of this is the character Bascule in Banks' Feersum Endjinn, who narrates like so: > Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Egrates the ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u 1/2 a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith. I personally enjoyed it and never had much trouble figuring it out, but know people who found it unpleasant and incomprehensible.

Hasnep 3y ago

My Chinese knowledge is limited, but I believe that words in Chinese would not be affected by accent in the same way. This is because even though, for example, in the Taiwanese accent sh is pronounced like s, "shi" and "si" are still "spelt" differently and consistently when using a phonetic writing system like pinyin or zhuyin. There are still individual words that are pronounced differently in different regions, but that's not related to accent.