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Comment by iafisher | Hacker News Reader

The problem with making spelling more phonetic is that not everyone pronounces English the same. Even a single country like the United States or the United Kingdom counts a range of accents and dialects. A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers.

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"A phonetic spelling is always going to be non-phonetic for some speakers."

Only if there is a single "correct" (or canonical) way to spell each word.

If every speaker uses a phonetic alphabet to spell their words the way they speak them then there will be no problem reading them back phonetically.

Now, understanding these phonetically spelled words might be a problem for some readers, but that's no different from the problem in understanding they'd have when they heard someone speak in a different accent.

There's even plenty of precedent for the same word having different spellings based on region, like with color/colour. I imagine it would be similarly normal to learn that "tomahto" is the British spelling of "tomato" (or whatever it would end up being).

We have that in south slavic languages. For example this word meaning time (or weather) spoken and written differently based on dialect/language: vreme, vrime, vrijeme. [1] Maybe a regional spelling reform could lead to English starting to break apart into several different languages?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialects_of_Serbo-Croatian

Ugh, no. You'd gain the very minor benefit of being able to read in the author's dialect but at huge cost in reading speed. I cringe whenever an author forces an accent or dialect into their writing rather than simply noting that a character speaks with a particular accent. It forces me to read at the speed I can vocalize, which is about half my normal reading speed.

I can see this being useful for specific cases but not as a general practice.

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