Hacker News Reader

Comment by avgcorrection | Hacker News Reader

I would take absolutely any phonetic spelling of English over the current spelling of English.

Bernard Shaw famously supported spelling reform, first merely reworking the standard orthography and later, in the form of the phonetic alphabets Shavian and later Quikscript by Kingsley Read. They're both obviously more consistent than Latin alphabet writing, and also often shorter so they might count as shorthand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript

Indeed; I'm a rhotic speaker but would even take a non-rhotic phonetic spelling over what we have today (things like cot/cart being spelled the same couldn't be more confusing that the current orthography)

If you go for the Southern English accent as the base for your non-rhotic phonetic spelling you don't even have to sacrifice distinguishing cot and cart -- they're different vowels because we don't have the father/bother merger :-)

Oh, I forgot about the father/bother merger because it is darn-near universal in the US. My mom is from one of the few places in the US that was non-rhotic and had avoided the caught-cot merger[1], thus resulting in "caught" and "cot" not being homophones, but "cot" and "cart" being homophones.

1: Past-tense because many kids seem to speak much closer to middle-american than even 20 years ago.

Whose phonology? English is a delightfully diverse language, spoken by delightfully diverse people!

That's why I said any! Australian, Anglo-Sikh, doesn't matter to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com