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Comment by _emacsomancer_ | Hacker News Reader

Given the variation amongst different varieties of English, a phonetically-based reform would be tricky. E.g., should we spell 'car' as 'kar' or 'kaa'?

(It's also worth mentioning that English spelling is position-dependent: there aren't any real words where 'gh' at the beginning is pronounced as 'f'.)

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Typically language reforms "solve" this problem by standardizing on whatever dialect is considered most broadly prestigious (often the dialect of the capital city).

Yeah, we already did this quite a while ago.

In 2020, which capital will you choose? London, Delhi, D.C., Canberra, &c. &c.?

In AmE the dialect would likely be "midwestern speech" since the political history of our "standard dialect" differs from that of many other countries. I would expect with English it might be best to consider the different major dialects separately, but at any point there's a tradeoff and someone gets the short end of the stick. The right way would probably be to bring in many different stakeholders from different speaking communities and hash out some compromises.

Incidentally, I was once chatting with a member of the English Spelling Society (they advocate spelling reform) and asked about this very topic. Shockingly it seemed like that group hadn't thought about it all.

> I would expect with English it might be best to consider the different major dialects separately, but at any point there's a tradeoff and someone gets the short end of the stick.

That seems like a bad idea to me. Standard Written English (which varies only slightly, with minor spelling differences) is fairly intelligible across speakers of different dialects and even quite a few time periods.

If English didn't already have a written standard, all of this might be worth considering. But actual reform would take massive effort for pretty minor benefits, which wouldn't endure long anyway given the ever constant presence of language change.

Manhattan?

> Given the variation amongst different varieties of English, a phonetically-based reform would be tricky.

Spanish has managed to do that. It has as much variety in its dialects as English (e.g. some dialects have very different "c" and "s" sounds or "b" and "v" sounds while others don't), yet all in all the orthography is quite regular and phonetic.

That's regular but not phonetic. (I'm not fully convinced that Spanish has quite as much variation as English, but I'll admit I'm not expert on Spanish.) But what do you do when certain segments are not just pronounced differently, but completely absent in some varieties? (E.g. my example about /kɑ:/ vs /kɑ:r/)

Let alone "absent in some varieties", there are sounds that are absent in all varieties but still spelled (e.g. the h in hombre or the u in queso). There was an attempt to regularize that in Latin America but the countries that tried to adopt it reverted back to the old spelling[1] - I guess the same will happen if someone tries to "reform" English

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bello_orthography

Apropos not much, I’m a native English speaker who is learning Spanish quite intensively, and I can say without a doubt that there is more variation across Spanish dialects than English. Different regions have hugely different lexicons, with many many different words for the same things. Just try to predict the word for “green pea” based on region! Learning Spanish is like learning 15 languages at once. It’s hilarious fun but specialization becomes a concern very very early.

I wasn't talking about lexical variation though. (I also wonder how much experience you have with the wide range of English varieties: there's quite a bit of lexical variation.) Lexical variation is pretty irrelevant for spelling changes.

> spell 'car' as 'kar' or 'kaa'?

You've forgotten "kair", the northeast/canadian maritimes version

Yeah, it wasn't meant to be exhaustive. One might add Jamaican 'cyaa' as well.

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