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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).

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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 :)

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