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Comment by pif | Hacker News Reader

The proper use of the Latin alphabet, or any other alphabet, should be top priority. Phonetic spelling: if you see it, you can pronounce it; if you hear it, you can write it.

Spelling bees have no sense in a rational language.

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Languages drift. What was straight spelling 10-20 centuries ago is now mismatch, because people now say these words differently. (Case in point: Italian vs classical Latin.)

To keep spelling in sync with pronunciation the spelling must be centrally controlled, like German, or Russian, or Spanish (the latter has the least-surprising spelling of all Latin-based modern languages I'm aware of, unless you're in Argentina).

Centralized control over English spelling is impossible due to a bunch of obvious reasons.

It's actually worse than this; you'd need centralised control over pronunciation as well. Otherwise, would a speaker of local Dublin english spell tree and three the same? And should a speaker of South Eastern Hiberno-English spell three and tree differently, even though the difference in their t and th is indistinguishable to most speakers of British English?

The lack of exact correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is a feature, not a bug.

> you'd need centralised control over pronunciation as well.

No, not at all. Several Italian words have regional variants, and they are simply spelled differently.

When you are used to a phonetic alphabet, you never wonder how to write what you say.

The differences in regional accents between say local Dublin English and the Supra regional Dublin accent (i.e. without even leaving the city) are reasonably large. I dunno what italian dialectal differences is, but Englishes are often very large city.

I'm not saying it's impossible; Trainspotting, for example, is mostly written in phonetic Scottish english. Many english speakers find it difficult to read though, for precisely that reason…

I would say that an exact, unambiguous phonetic writing (like in Spanish, Korean, Japanese kana, Mongol in Cyrillic mode, etc) would help flatten the pronunciation differences.

Languages drift, true. That's why you need spelling to follow, or else it only gets worse until all benefits of using an alphabet are lost.

Just do the occasional orthography cleanup every couple of decades and keep the old spelling around as deprecated until it's gone. If shifts in regional accents aren't perfectly consistent it's no big loss, their evolution will still be less inconsistent running on top of a of a non-fossilized standard orthography than without those cleanup efforts.

What obvious reasons do you see for English? Russian might be a language with a central authority claiming total control over all speakers, but both German and Spanish are 1:n in the relationship of language : state.

> What was straight spelling 10-20 centuries ago is now mismatch

I'm afraid you don't know how things work when people are used to phonetic correspondence: pronunciation changes, and spelling follows naturally.

As an example, consider the name of Florence. Originally it was "Florentia", today it is "Firenze": the name itself changed, and the spelling followed suit. That's because people in Italy do not ever ask themselves: "How do I write this?". The alphabet is there to express how you pronounce it, and not to support a parallel written language that does (not) evolve by itself!

Spelling bees are for those poor souls who saw their language drastically changed when being invaded by the kings of silent letters and wasted ink.

Phonetic spelling implies that one pronunciation is correct over all other alternatives, that certainly would not work for anything close to current-day english

Phonetic spelling implies that there's at least one pronunciation that correlates 1:1 to spelling, but it certainly does not rule out different pronunciations. Other pronunciations can also be 1:1, if they shift in parallel ways which actually isn't that unlikely, or they can do their own thing, the existence of a 1:1 version is still helpful even there. German-speaking Swiss share their written language with Germans (with some trivial exceptions like having cleared out the ß) but they are perfectly capable of talking in a way that is 100% indecipherable for Germans who haven't spent years learning (and even when Germans have lived their half their lives there trying to adopt the local pronunciation mapping is frowned upon).

> German-speaking Swiss share their written language with Germans ... but they are perfectly capable of talking in a way that is 100% indecipherable for Germans

You are talking there of a proper language on one side, and a bunch of non-codified dialects who never got any written form.

Yet those dialects tend to deviate from the standard language in very regular ways, even if they are perfectly incomprehensible to the uninitiated. When some new term appears in the standard language, speakers sharing the same dialect will independently shift it in the same way.

> Phonetic spelling implies that there's at least one pronunciation that correlates 1:1 to spelling

No! Phonetic spelling implies that each pronunciation correlates 1:1 with one spelling.

You seem to read "phonetic spelling" as using an alphabet that can encode any utterance in a reproducible way, like the International Phonetic Alphabet. I'd call that phonetic encoding, not phonetic spelling. One is explicitly language neutral, the other can be wildly language specific, but still very regular within the language specific ruleset. And those language specific rulesets usually come with a wide variety of "inofficial" variants used by regional dialects, most of which still being far more regular and internally consistent than the mess that is English.

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