[samgutentag]

"English spelling has a reputation. And it’s not a good one." - never have i ever agreed with anything more

different hill, but one I would die on is: as the letter "c" should make the "ch" sound, the letter "c" serves no purpose not already handled by "s" or "k" otherwise

[murderfs]

https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm

  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.

[SamBam]

> fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all

But we'd still be arguing about how to pronounce "ᵹif"

[the_lucifer]

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

[pmcarlton]

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.

[mixmastamyk]

Recommend X for the ‘sh’ sound, as it is pronounced that way in languages like Portuguese. Y is a common typographical substitute for theta/thorn, as in “ye olde shoppe.”

[tim333]

By the way the source was a Mr Shield's letter to the Economist rather than Twain https://web.archive.org/web/20200311221105/http://www.letter...

[bmacho]

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

[kevin_thibedeau]

English's spelling irregularities help with disambiguating homophones:

  cent / sent / scent
  ceiling / sealing
  cite / sight / site
  colonel / kernel
  carrot / karat
  cue / queue

[jleyank]

Which, of course, does not help things like polish polish (made in Warsaw) and to produce produce (pull apples out of a bag). However you look at it, when they set up English words and spelling there was large quantities of alcohol involved.

[jraph]

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

[hajile]

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.

[its-kostya]

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.

[int_19h]

Some other languages do the same with diacritics.

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

[normie3000]

And cause confusion with needless heterographs?

practice / practise licence / license

[jmyeet]

"Ch" is a strange hill to die on. "Ch" has a mostly consistent pronunciation (eg chair, touch, chain, choke, recharge, etc) that no other letter combination does.

Exceptions to this are generally loan words, particularly from French (eg chaise, which sounds more like "sh"). Others are harder to explain. "Lichen" springs to mind. Yes it technically comes from Latin but we're beyond the time range to truly consider it a loan word.

There are also some "ch" words of Greek origin (IIRC) that could simply be replaced with "c" or "k" (eg chemistry, school).

"Kh" on the other hand I think is entirely loan words, particularly from Arabic. Even then we have names like "Achmed" that would more consistently be written as "Akhmen". "Khan" is obviously a loan word but I think time has largely reduced the pronunciation to "karn" rather than "kharn" if it ever was that.

But I can't think of a single "kh" word that pronounced like "ch" in "chair".

"Sh" doesn't seem to crossover with any of these pronunciations.

[jacquesm]

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

[arkensaw]

> It’s full of silent letters, as in numb, knee, and honour. A given sound can be spelled in multiple ways (farm, laugh, photo), and many letters make multiple sounds (get, gist, mirage).

that last one is hardly fair - gist and mirage are french words. might as well complain about the silent letters in rendezvous or faux pas.

[pessimizer]

Almost every English word is French, except for the most important ones.

[ochrist]

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.

[user982]

But which "ch" sound? "Ch" as in "church" is just "tsh". "Ch" as in "charade" is just "sh".

[cwnyth]

Seconding this. C should be the ʃ sound, and then TC should be the "ch" in "church." The fact that there's no one letter for ʃ is the real tragedy.

[o11c]

I've played around with respelling quite a bit; one of the most difficult adaptations is forcing yourself to correctly use "dh" (few-but-common words, "thy", "either", "teethe") vs "th" (most words, "thigh", "ether", "teeth").

j -> dzh is more weird than anything.

Vowels, of course, are a cause of war between dialects; nobody can even agree how many there are.

[int_19h]

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.

[emmelaich]

Bring back þ!

[zcdziura]

I completely agree with you. I've taken an amateurish interest in linguistics over the past couple of years, and I've often thought that it might be a fun exercise to come up with a phonetic alphabet for the English language. Use the letter 'c' to represent /ch/, 'x' to represent /sh/, etc.

Maybe as a fun pet project someday!

[shemtay]

Words of Latin origin are identifiable at a glance, and homonymic collisions are thereby avoided

-- Caeser, seizer of the day

[user982]

"Caesar" was pronounced in Latin with a hard C, which is preserved in German ("Kaiser").

[tbrake]

Changing "cube" to "kube" would just look like it's pronounced "koob" (e.g. rube, tube, lube), so we swap a minor spelling aggravation for a minor pronunciation edge case. unless you want to go full kyube but we're not putting that on the table.

[cvoss]

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).)

[nicoburns]

kyube or kyoob would definitely be the way to go.

It's funny you use "tube" as an example though, as in my British accent I pronounce that as "chube", whereas I believe many Americans would use a "t" sound for that word. Not sure how you settle on a spelling in those cases.

[int_19h]

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.

[hajile]

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

[Swizec]

> as the letter "c" should make the "ch" sound

What’s the ch sound? My intuition from German class is that ch represents a throaty hhhh. Somehow that got spoiled into k in most English words.

Every c in Pacific Ocean is pronounced differently. C is a silly letter.

[1718627440]

> 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.

[microtherion]

> 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.