i am inclined to agree on all points, and while the second parenthetical would be useful in Contemporary English, i cannot help but note that "þ" and "ð" in Old English both represented the same phoneme (unlike in, say, Icelandic). all of the OE fricatives (/s/, /f/, /þ/) had predictable phonetic voicing depending on environment (voiced intervocalically, unvoiced elsewhere), but no phonemic distinction. in extant MSS, <þ> and <ð> are completely interchangable, mere stylistic variants of writing the phoneme, and even texts written by a single scribe will often have the same word written with both letters. some older MSS will use a plain <d> for the voiced sound (and a plain <b> for the voiced /f/). i've seen at least one MS that used <th>. in Latinized versions of OE names, it's not uncommon to see <th> or <d>, but Classical OE spelling didn't generally distinguish the voiced or unvoiced.

even in Contemporary OE, there are very few minimal pairs between /þ/ and /ð/ ("thigh" vs. "thy" comes to mind, but not much else apart from rare noun/verb combos like "loath" vs. "loathe"). it could be argued that we don't really need both, but the (surely obvious by now) pedant in me desires both. saying "boð" rather than "boþ" doesn't strictly change the meaning, and is not likely to cause confusion, but it sure sounds off!

It would be good to see the old english letters brought in. I particularly enjoy thorn.

It also occurs in Southern African languages, e.g. in the place name Hluhluwe, in KwaZulu.

This is just a feature of Castilian Spanish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis... \th\ only occurs naturally in like 5% of the thousands of human languages that have ever existed. Just because those languages are some of the most widely-spoken ones worldwide does not make the sound a commonly-occurring one in a meaningful phonological sense.

Lots of Germans do this too, in my experience.

It depends on whether you define "rare" in terms of language variety or human variety, obviously. In terms of languages, it is a relatively rare phoneme. It occurs more often as an allophone of other phonemes, but in that case the speakers may not be able to distinguish it and will struggle to reproduce it in "unusual" environments.

And the r ending verbs like "parler" is still silent.

> a true Brit

There are a wide variety of accents in Britain alone - ‘wahtah’ isn’t recognisable to me for example. It’s a cliche to say brits don’t pronounce “r”, but all you have to do is watch Harry Potter to see all the different accents that do.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

--James D. Nicoll

Kingsley Read went with something like an artificially rhotic midcentury RP when designing the Shavian alphabet. It works reasonably well for me, a Standard Canadian English speaker, except that distinguishing all the open vowels (father/bought/bot) can be a struggle,

I believe that there is a lowest common denominator for accented English, and it sounds like “sung” English - which sounds like non-regional American English if the singer is singing and doesn’t naturally have a very pronounced accent. This is partially due to cultural effects but partially due to the mechanics of speaking with an accent.

By “lowest common denominator“, I mean omitting affectations like non-rotic R (Boston) and dropped g (urban) and exaggerated length of selected vowels (US southeast) and constant syllable length and other kinds of things. There are lots of videos on YouTube about how accents work.

But mainly phonetics is about eliminating silent letters, using the most unambiguous letter when there is a choice (eg K or S instead of C), etc.

Anyway I’m rambling but you probably get my point.

I don’t think it’s etymology and irregularity that make English “fun”; I think that it’s English’s large number of concepts because we freely appropriate words and their ideas from other languages (“schadenfreude”, “Deja vu”, etc), the small alphabet, the lack of diacritics, and the flexibility that has been forced onto it primarily by American speakers abusing grammar- verbification, etc.

I think that simplified English is the most likely candidate for a universal human language. The “Unicode of languages”, if you will.

Spelling can also bridge the gap between phonetic differences between accents. Many variants of English don't even have the same number of sounds as others, but we all "come together" when we write.

In English, it would frustrate me if every time I read marry it would be spelled the same as merry, because I say those differently, even if most Americans I come in contact with daily do not.

Spanish spelling is much more phonetic than English, but one thing I admire about it is when things are correctly spelled, you can adjust the text for accent based on spelling. The only area I can think of where spelling does not denote contrast in any accent is between b and v. (Edit: and that h is silent.) There are some contrasts that are only kept by a minority of speakers (Ll is merged with Y for most people, but maybe not in Bolivia or parts of Spain; s and z are merged in Latin America), but it's still a meaningful contrast for somebody.

Couldn't you use a subset of IPA for this? (Not a language person, so I don't know)

> "this is text translated to a phonetic version" goes to "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænzˈleɪtɪd tuː ə fəʊˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜːʒᵊn" in British pronunciation and "ðɪs ɪz tɛkst trænˈsleɪtɪd tu ə fəˈnɛtɪk ˈvɜrʒən" in American.

These samples are using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which isn’t really designed for the purpose of being a practical orthography — it’s used as a language-independent transcription method which can represent any sound. (That’s also why the British and American versions are different: different accents use different sounds, so they’re transcribed differently.) So this isn’t really a ‘phonetic spelling of English’, though it’s easy to see where the confusion comes from.

I remember a version which ends with how we'll end up speaking German.

The nice thing about this passage is it reflects the extent of Twain's non-rhotic dialect -- he keeps the R in "year"/"years", "orthographical", and "world" but drops it in "after", "letters", and "dodderers". So only dropped in final unstressed syllables of multi-syllable words.

I'm convinced that this is Just The Right Thing To Do. Like ridiculously strong benefits, and practically no drawbacks at all.

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Only in writing. The disambiguation is already needed when spoken and the context does this.

If you look up these words in the dictionary, the same word with the same spelling very often has several different definitions that are often unrelated because homographs (same spelling, but different meaning) are super-common in English. Dictionaries don't account for newer or more niche meanings of words either.

How is it that you can say these words without confusion?

Language is context sensitive and you understand the word based on the context around it. Likewise, you understand homographs based on the context. Because of this, spelling isn't as important as it might appear.

On paper, yes. But not when someone speaks. If you used a homophone while speaking, the listener would be able to distinguish which variant the talker intended based on context. I would argue this is enough of a reason for written text as well.

Some other languages do the same with diacritics.

Most don't bother because context is nearly always sufficient.

And cause confusion with needless heterographs?

practice / practise licence / license

In Dutch and German Ch is pronounced as 'g'.

In Danish knee is 'knæ' and the K is pronounced very clearly. It's interesting that English speaking people have forgotten how to pronounce K before N, so the Danish king Knud became Canute.

I kinda wish English avoided Xh type digraphs because they screw up common borrowings like Thai. Sure, that's not strictly phonemic in English, but I think realistically given how readily English adopts foreign words into it without completely nativizing them phonemically, any orthography should strive to reflect that, meaning that combinations like "th" should have their obvious meanings that can be inferred by native speakers even if such a sequence never occurs in native words.

Esperanto has a nice trick where they reserve "x" as a modifier letter, so if you can't use diacritics you write "cx", "sx", "jx" etc; but it does not have a sound value of its own and can never occur by itself. We could extend this to "tx" and "dx" with obvious values, and also to vowels - "a" for /æ/ vs "ax" for /ɑ/, "i" for "ɪ" vs "ix" for /i/ etc. Using "j" the way it is today feels somewhat wasteful given how rare it is. In the x-system it would probably be best represented by "gx", and then we could have a saner use for "j" like all other Germanic languages do. Which would free up "y" so we could use it for the schwa.

One thing that occurred to me the other day is that "x" is also a diacritic, so we could just say that e.g. "sx" and "s͓" are the same thing. Then again from a purely utilitarian perspective a regular dot serves just fine and looks neater (and would be a nice homage to Old English even if ċ and ġ are really just a modern convention).

Vowels, yeah... I think it's pretty much impossible to do a true phonemic orthography for English vowels that is not dialect-specific. As in, either some dialects will have homographs that are not homonyms, or else other dialects will not have the ability to "write it as you speak it" because they'll need to use different letters for the same (to them) sound. In the latter case, it would become more of a morphological orthography. Which would still be a massive improvement if it's at least consistent.

OTOH if you look at General American specifically, and treat [ə] and [ʌ] as stress-dependent allophones, then you can get away with 9 vowel characters in total (ɪiʊuɛəoæɑ). That's pretty easy with diacritics.

Well, it would be a step backward in the right direction to go with spelling it 'kube' and pronouncing it 'koob'. That would hew to the original Greek. We'd also bring cybernetic back closer to kubernetes. And circle to kuklos. (Side note: It's another spelling "error" that we use 'y' in English to transliterate the Greek upsilon, which looks like 'Y' when capitalized, but is really a better match to 'u'. Hence, hyper and hypo instead of huper and hupo (like super and sub).)

Why would it? "u" generally doesn't follow this pattern in English after "k" any more so than it does after "c".

That aside, what you describe is a distinction between yod-dropping and lack thereof, and whether and where it happens is highly dialect dependent.

This is an issue because vowel letters/digraphs are much more inconsistent than consonant letters/digraphs.

> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh

If you mean the standard German from Germany, there a two variants. At the end of a syllable it is like you described (kind of throaty hhhh). For the beginning of syllables think of sh and open your mouth.

> My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh

It varies between dialects. Swiss German speakers tend to stick out to Germans because we pronounce the ch in a much scratchier way than is accepted in Standard German.

They still treat the g consistently the same in every word. It's silent-ish in all words, not some.

The influence of English does exist in Western Dutch accents. Speaking like somebody that sounds like they're coming from Leiden or Vlaardingen should be much easier for people from English speaking countries. Like the r that sounds like a w, like the English pronounce "rare".

In Old English it was already pronounced /j/ there, even though the spelling was still "weg". Ditto for Old Frisian, so Normans had nothing to do with it.

The process is actually fairly straightforward. First you start with a common language that has two allophones for /g/ which are ~ [g] and [ɣ], depending on context; in this case, "weg" was [weɣ].

In Old Dutch [ɣ] then becomes subject to final obstruent devoicing, giving [x] of the modern Dutch pronunciation of the same word.

Meanwhile in Old English /k/ and /g/ (in either of its incarnations) palatalized in various environments instead. For [ɣ] in particular, it became palatalized after [e] in most cases - thus we get [weʝ]. And then [ʝ] is already very similar to [j], and gradually evolved into the latter. This all has already happened by the time most Old English texts were written.

The article is describing the generally accepted reconstruction of Middle English pronunciation, which is based not only on the modern pronunciation, but also on comparison with related languages.

S/was/is/ in as much as the pronunciation remains even if the chain doesn't.

Why is the far right always so racist?

ᵹ has a clear line of development back to capital "G": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_script#/media/File:Evo...

And AFAIK Georgian alphabet predates Insular script by a few centuries.

It's not uncommon for otherwise unrelated alphabets to come with similar symbols simply because the trend over time is towards simplification of letter shapes, and there are only so many basic elements. So even originally quite different characters can end up looking very similar when reduced to a few squiggles.

That is indeed a problem with English, but even then it is possible to come up with a morpho-somewhat-phonemic spelling that would be far more consistent than modern English - because the bar set by the standard orthography is really that low.

And OTOH even modern English spelling often doesn't distinguish differences that are there in most dialects (e.g. "bear" vs "near"), so this isn't even a new problem. Realistically I suspect there's some "minimal reasonable set" of phonemes that need to be distinguished to reflect the most prominently distinct pairs in all major dialects, even if some subtle dialectal distinctions might not be reflected in spelling.

Indian languages, yes, but the story is more complicated with languages that use Indic scripts.

Tibetan, Mon-Burmese and Thai scripts, as an example, all derive from the Brahmi script (through a long and sometimes windy ancestry), but neither reflects the modern pronunciation, hence mind numbing transcription systems.

Tibetan and Burmese languages are particularly notorious for codifying the archaic pronunciation of respective languages that has been frozen in time for centuries. It is a treasure trove for linguists that have got a time machine for free, but I don't think that the same can't be said modern speakers of both languages.

> Many Indian languages are written in scripts that mirror what is spoken. Silent letters don't exist and pronunciations that don't match the spelling are very rare.

I don't think that's true. From the northern Indian languages schwa deletion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_deletion_in_Indo-Aryan_l...) to the extreme divergence between the standard formal and spoken forms of languages in Southern languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia), it's a stretch to say the scripts mirror what is spoken.

It's just that if you are a native speaker/reader, you are so fluent that you unconsciously auto-correct those inconsistencies - just like in English.

Even in the formal registers of each spoken Indian language, which should be in theory be more systematically consistent with their scripts, there are inconsistencies in spelling/pronunciation of loan-words from both foreign and other Indian languages (i.e. aspirates in South India and retroflex approximates in northern India, and any number of inconsistent renderings of English words in Indic script).

It plays out perfectly. E.g. Chinese is one of the least phonological scripts around, and this is precisely why old texts in it are more interpretable.

Korean Hangul is not ideographic (I think what you meant by pictorial?). It's a morphophonemic alphabet that just happens to organize the basic phonemic units into larger graphemes representing whole syllables - but in a completely predictable way. And it is another example of this playing out: the original Hangul was entirely phonemic, but over time pronunciation diverged from spelling, and today it's morpho-phonemic, and even then not perfectly so. So they preserved the history at the cost of some mismatch between the spelling and the sound.

> i find it hard to believe the true statistics are as dire as you say but i'm prepared to accept that it is.

https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

> It's annoying enough for me when some books use French words.

From around 1060 to 1360, French was the official language of England. It wasn't normal French though as William the Conqueror spoke Norman French. Both French dialects mixed in what can only be considered English style. For example Norman French said Warder while other French speakers said Guarder. English adopted both Warden and Guard, but gave them two different meanings. Overall, some 30% of our words are French though over 800 of the most common 1000 words are English in origin.

> would adding half a dozen letters to the alphabet really help with increasing literacy?

ITA (International Teaching Alphabet) shows the benefits and problems.

ITA students rocketed ahead the first couple of years and could read way more words than their traditional counterparts. The problem was the transition. Learning both systems seems to have evened things up or maybe even caused a net negative for ITA students. I believe this was because they had to learn two sets of spelling for everything. If you would like to see the difficulty in learning a new way to read/write and have a bit of fun, try learning Shavian script.

In an ideal world, they would have phonetic spelling only. I believe under those conditions that their advantage would continue to grow all the way through school. The problem is that this study is unethical to conduct because even if it is correct, the students would graduate and be unable to read traditional English which would permanently harm them.

This leaves the tricky problem of bridging the gap. This can't be done too quickly or the older generations get left behind. There's also an issue of transcribing everything into the new spelling. Technology has made that easier than ever, but it would still be a very hard proposition.

The first and easiest step is cleaning up the spellings using the letters we currently have. Stuff like all those -ough endings get rewritten in sane letters as an accepted alternative spelling. Silent letters start going away. We start moving toward consistent vowel and consonant digraphs. This will take time for older people to adapt to, but more consistent rules will mean they will have an easier time sounding them out.

After this, we start adding back letters. Maybe eth and thorn come back for the two "th" sounds. We certainly need a new letter for the S in "treaSure" and maybe bring back the elongated S to use for SH. At some point, we then start working on slowly adding new characters to stand in for the vowel digraphs.

I don't think you could convince adults to do more than a couple of steps at a time each generation. Such a plan would likely take decades to maybe even a century or two. Until the creation of the printing press, such slow changes were considered normal. Only in recent times have we attempted to gate-keep what "real English" is. If we allow the language to grow more organically, I think it could be guided into something far better than we have today.