Real alphabet for English?

http://bearfabrique.org/EnglishAlphabet/English_Alphabet.htm ^

[varmintman]

The whole world knows that English spelling is a sick joke. If English is to be the international language of business and commerce, then a rational alphabet and a rational system of spelling need to be devised for it, and the present hodgepodge system needs to be jettissoned altogether. The inordinate amount of time spent by foreigners and English speaking children alike learning our present system of spelling would be better of spent on more reasonable goals.

A reasonable system of spelling for English would be based on the following ideas:

• It should to the extent possible use letters which English speaking people are already familiar with rather than new or strange symbols.
• In cases in which a letter has more than one possible pronounciation, accent marks should be used to differentiate the cases (rather than divising new characters).
• It should be based on the real-world assumption that text is primarily created with keyboards, and not with goose feathers and ink as was the case when our present system of writing was devised.
• It should be supported by software which fills in proper accent marks automatically with context. That is easily within present technological capabilities.
• It should include no doubled letters other than possibly for some borrowed word within which a vowel sound is doubled.
• It should be utterly unambiguous and 100% phonetic. That means that if you hear a word spoken you know how to spell it and, if you see a word written, you know how to pronounce it other than for the question of which syllable if any is stressed.

The following should serve as an example of what is needed.....

[Vroomfondel]

Just need to punch up the spelling of Shakespeare a bit: “2 B or not 2 B, that is the question”

[GeronL]

bump

thanks

[Greysard]

The closest you can get to a simpler sounding/spelled language is Spanish or Latin.

Esperanto was specifically designed to be simple. It is based on Spanish, IIRC.

[Yardstick]

Yep, or like in multi-language instruction booklets. English invariably takes less space to say the same thing. Somehow English is more efficient.

[vikingd00d]

>>It should be utterly unambiguous and 100% phonetic. That means that if you hear a word spoken you know how to spell it and, if you see a word written, you know how to pronounce it other than for the question of which syllable if any is stressed.

And when dialects are added in... this “new” system self-destructs (think of listening to some inbred Boston native pronounce “park the car” as /pahk da cah/ . Standard orthography was put in place precisely to avoid all the duplicate spellings generated by dialects.

[Liberty Wins]

It’s been tried. George Bernard Shaw willed his estate to change the English language to a purely phonetic spelling but the administrators decided to apply his millions elsewhere.

[caver]

Would you rather learn 40,000 unique Chinese characters? I’ll keep my English just the way it is.

[HartleyMBaldwin]

Or people can just learn English. Oh, wait, that requires work.

[unlearner]

Good luck with that. Common sense has never been able to replace the qwerty keyboard which was originally designed to SLOW the typists down to prevent manual typewriters from jamming. Reason, logic and common sense do not dictate our cultural standards. This also readily explains the abysmal results of democracy in our nation.

[unlearner]

After viewing the linked page, I have to say this is not well thought out.

Changing P to a trilled R sound? Double R’s make more sense.

The U accent marks do not correctly distinguish the various pronunciations of U. (You and hoop have the same vowel sounds.) Where is the vowel sound for words like “foot”?

Dropping W? Really? None of the U accents replace the sound W makes.

Adding pi?

Besides the fact that successful languages are not created by committee (unless you consider languages like Esperanto successful), many of the updates in the list would not improve anything, plus it adds a lot of unnecessary work to write or type for those who are already fluent. A real solution would not just make things easier for someone learning but also for those using the language. This complicates things far more than it resolves them.

[octex]

Great posting showing how things could progress with this stupid idea! Very creative, and I’m sure it was difficult to compose.

[dangus]

not mine, though.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Worse than the spelling is that English has too many phonemes and homonyms.

The funniest example of this is here:

Gallagher and Logical Flaws of the English language

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

No ə?

I have a good ear. I have noticed that a large number of people...in most cases African Americans...cannot or do not pronounce the "schwa" sound as we expect to hear it.

The word 'many' comes out as 'mini' or 'meeny'. There are a lot of other examples. Listen for it. It's odd.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

maybee thay need to spel thingz fonticalli. due yung peepol nott due that alredi wen thay teckst on thayr i-fonez?

[dfwgator]

[null and void]

Lemme ax you how you noticed dat?

[discostu]

It’s a borrowed language. You can never make the spelling of a borrowed language truly make sense because the sources are too diverse. In the end English is a loose collection of exceptions much more than it is about rules.

[PrairieLady2]

Hebrew is much easier than any of it, and is the root of all languages to begin with.

[alexander_busek]

German still has a ways to go with some of the vowel digraphs (ei and eu could perhaps be replaced with ï and ë respectively?) as well as find new uses for redundant c and v, not to mention trigraphs (sch) and tetragraphs (tsch). There’s also the “Sie” conundrum.

Well, "ä," "ö," and "ü" were originally digraphs ("ae," "oe," and "ue"), until the trailing "e" was reduced in size and move atop the leading vowel, where it eventually degenerated into the "Umlaut." In the font "Fraktur," the "s" was written differently, depending upon whether it was medial or final. I believe that the lovely "ß" had an equally interesting story behind it - sadly, what with the Orthographical Reform of the 1990s, its use is in decline.

I see no problem with tri- and tetragraphs; the corresponding sounds are consistently spelled that way, and - conversely - the letters, when arranged that way, always represent the given sound (except when in juxtaposition in certain rare compound words). The point is, after all, consistency - not brevity.

Sadly, too, many beloved words are falling into disusage or are actually being actively proscribed, especially forms of address: "Fräulein," "Herr Ober," "mein Herr," "Herr Student."

And that the Genitive Case is quietly expiring is a well-known phenomenon.

Ihr ergebendster Diener