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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

If this irritates anyone, you might be interested in the work of George Bernard Shaw and Kingsley Read to reform English spelling. They proposed a consistent, phonetic, spelling and writing system called Shavian and published a now-rare book using that system. The second iteration made some slight usability and efficiency improvements and called the new work Quikscript.

Of course, in an alternate universe, this superior writing system was adopted along with the full SI unit system.

https://omniglot.com/writing/shavian.htm

https://shavian.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/1/10212142/30817_or...

https://www.quikscript.net/

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There has been a very successful, though limited, reform of English spelling, by Noah Webster. It's him you can thank (or blame) for analyze, color, center, defense, and connection replacing their original spellings (analyse, colour, centre, defence, and connexion).

But we didn't learn. We kept at most of it - phoenix, cough, dough etc. He even suggested sensible transformations such as ache → ake, soup → soop, tongue → tung, machine → masheen etc. All of these make phonetical sense unlike the existing spellings (for whatever reason they exist).

I had read about Cut Spelling which, to me, sounds more like SMS lingo - something like "how du u du" - and even though I find SMS lingo really irritating (I have to see that a lot on dating apps) it actually does make sense phonetically :)

> reform English spelling

You forgot about this one: http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html.

I think that came from Mark Twain.

First published in Astounding Science Fiction, 1946 (Astounding later become Analog). Often recirculated with accumulated changes. As far as I know, this is the original.

MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM

by Dalton Edwards

Benjamin Franklin too was an advocate of reforming spelling, and phonetic spelling.

Seems to be a recurring theme for English because it's such a difficult language owing largely to its awful spelling.

But it has never, and probably will never, take off, unless, perhaps, we first have a Jacobin Revolution in the U.S. and UK, complete with a Terror of our own. God forbid. (Though even that didn't fix the French language.)

It seems like proposing both a spelling reform and a script reform at the same time is doomed to failure. It's a fun experiment but if one is serious about proposing a pragmatic reform of English spelling, stick to the Latin alphabet and maybe add a few diacritics if you really need to. Can you imagine the insane amount of churn changing to a completely different script would create?

I don't know, it would make for a clean break with no confusion and middle ground. That might actually be easier to adopt than minor spelling shifts that could easily be seen as mistakes.

You don't need to go to an alternate Universe to find a place that uses a phonetic script and the metric system. Just go to India.

Germany had a spelling reform in the 90s that changed words to be spelled more phonetically rather than how they would have been spelled in their origin languages. For example "Delphin" (dolphin) became "Delfin" because German isn't Greek.

And even Greek uses a single letter for the "f" sound. The fact that "φ" is transliterated as "ph" is a historical accident: in ancient Greek the letter was pronounced like p with an extra puff of air, like in "Phuket".

Which is reflected in some contractions where, e.g., ἀπὸ αἵματος becomes ἀφ’ αἵματος

Interesting! Never seen that phenomenon, do you know if it persists in Modern Greek?

Isn't that how it's spelled in Greek too though? Well, with the Greek alphabet anyway. I think it's Δελφίν.

Quite a lot of languages well outside of India and United States are spelled phonetically.

In Spanish on my teen years, which saw the rise of SMS and MSN Messenger, it was very common to see a simplified version of Spanish, where "hola" became "ola" since the h is mute, and similar changes. It was a brief period though, since now everyone (my age) uses proper grammar, and younger generations use English mixed in instead.

ola k ase?

But that was because of the hard character limit in SMS messages, and that they used to cost money.

It was also very common to write long messages in "translit" (substituting Latin letters for equivalent Cyrillic ones, e.g. ф -> f) back then here in Russia since you could fit in 160 characters using GSM 03.38 (7-bit encoding) instead of 70 characters with UCS-2 (UTF-16 encoded) and SMS messages were quite expensive.

Transliterated messages are still quite popular in Georgia (გამარჯობა, როგორ ხარ? > gamarjoba, rogor xar?), even in places where character limits don't apply. Which makes it practically impossible to use any translation services, as there are many ways to substitute a single letter or a sound, making reversing extremely hard. And if you add to the mix the poor quality of those translation services for Georgian language in general, you get texts that mostly make sense to just native speakers.

My younger Mexican in-laws who still occasionally use text-ese would say "q" instead of "k" (the latter normally being pronounced ka, while q is pronounced que).

https://www.shavian.info

I have a feeling SMS/texting lingo will succeed at what others, including Benjamin Franklin, Shaw, Webster, failed at :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_language

>Of course, in an alternate universe, this superior writing system was adopted along with the full SI unit system.

in that same universe do we eliminate 2^N in favor of 10^N?

Doublings are much more intuitive than powers of 10.

If most logarithms were taken base 2 it would make a big improvement in their comprehensibility to laypeople.

For closest link to western music, use binary logarithms represented using duodecimals. It makes a very nice simple system for approximate arithmetic, since 1 digit after the duodecimal point is enough to represent 3 and 5 reasonably closely. (The same two approximations that make our music sound harmonic also make approximate arithmetic easy and convenient). Of course, that would work even better if we switched to using base twelve for general arithmetic and metrology, overall a big improvement over the often inconvenient decimal system.

No I think we’d just be born with four fingers on each hand.

Nice! Fascinating how many letters you need to represent all the vowels.

Western American English has 14 vowels and some parts of Eastern have 15 (the caught/cot distinction).

Interesting. The pin-pen merger and caught-cot merger have very little (if any) overlap.

It looks like Florida and Texas might soon merge caught and cot, while retaining the pin-pen merger, in which case they'd only have 13 vowels, but I suspect they would probably end up splitting pin and pen eventually as their regional accent gets watered down to be closer to the General American accent.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Pin-pen....

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Co...

My mom grew up in Rhode Island and she pronounced cot/caught differently, but cot/cart the same.

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