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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

This is cute, up until the point where it starts reaching and makes changes which are important for the sound of the language.

The e in many words isn't silent, it's a modifier. Kit and kite are different words. "th", "z", "w", and "v" are all really different sounds. While certain accents (or children) do occasionally conflate them, in basically every case, it's technically incorrect. Zebra, Webra, Vebra, and Thebra are all totally different words to a native English speaker.

I'm absolutely behind the idea of simplified English where spelling and pronunciation match. But that's a lofty goal, as first one would have to canonize English, which is basically impossible at this point. Then they'd have to tackle homonyms, like cot and caught (assuming canonized English has these pronounced the same).

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So basically English spelling is trapped in a local minimum. An small change will make spelling closer to some dialect, and further from most other dialects. The current situation is suboptimal for everyone, but at least it's a Nash equilibrium.

I personally think there's a lot of room for improvements that would work in nearly all English dialects. The "ough" mess, for example, could stand some clean up. But in general, yes, there is too much variation in English around the world to "fix" it now.

You're hitting the phonological analogue of Moravec's law: the "ough" mess is precisely the kind of thing that can't easily be simplified in a way that works across English dialects. It hits a wide swath of basic vocabulary that originally had a small range of slightly awkward pronunciations that diverged in descendant English. Different dialects don't split those pronunciations the same way.

The real low-hanging fruit is getting the British to give up on those spellings that follow a dead branch of French ;-)

That's certainly true for things like vowels, but there are other situations where spelling could be changed with no ambiguity problems in any dialect. For example, basically every word that contains "gh" can be simplified, as <gh> represents a /x/ sound like German "Bach" that dropped out of the language in the 1200s. Nobody is confused by "tho" and "thru".

Another easy example is just fixing "island". The <s> was never pronounced. Medieval scribes put it there because they incorrectly guessed that the word was related to Latin "insula".

Because 'Kite' should be spelt 'Kait'. The English I/E/AI vowel sounds are a massive mess. I realised this only after starting lessons in Japanese, where the vowel sounds are almost entirely regular. Ke always sounds like Kelp, and Ki always sounds like Kit and Ka will always sound like Kart.

I'd pronounce kite and kait differently I think. More rising on the latter. Being acceptably good at Dutch pronunciation, though non-native, I'd suggest keit, and I'm assuming that it's the same in German too.

But really, it should be kite because that's what it is :)

Well kite could be written as keit to match the pronunciation :)

For most non-native speakers, the backtracking of silent `e` is more confusing. It does not help in case of `sake` vs `saké` where most people do not add the acute mark and use context for disambiguation.

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