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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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