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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't the International Phonetic Alphabet be a good starting point ?

IPA is useful for expressing phonetics, but the phonetics for a given word in English shift over time and space. Written language is useful for expression that is durable in time and space.

If you read English texts from the wrong side of the pond, there's some spelling divergence, and if you read old enough texts, there's more. And of course we have new words, and new uses of old words, such as literally which now means figuratively.

But if you read old books of rhymes, you can see that spoken English has diverged a lot more -- many clever rhymes of the past no longer sound rhyming.

Absolutely not. Slavish adherence to phonetics means you need to standardize a dialect for your orthography, include extraneous changes (like shifts in vowels caused by adjacent words) and isn't done by any writing system I know of.

Sure it is, just look at the various phases of German spelling reform. The most recent one was implemented via international treaty.

German is a good example. The pronunciation of Standard German is different in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. If we wrote German in IPA, it would be different in all three countries. Even within Germany, somebody from Munich would either write something very different from somebody in Berlin, or they would have to imagine how a Hannoverian would pronounce the word, in order to write the standard spelling. Because German orthography is standardized and is not a phonetic alphabet, people in Switzerland can say /r/ and people in the Rhineland can say /ʁ/ but they both write <r> and thus spell words the same way.

Sure, if you're bikeshedding with an outsider's perspective, that could totally work

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