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For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.
The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.
Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
I naturally read "iear" as "ear", not "year". And I read "awai" as something similar to "uh-why" (I'm having trouble translating the exact sound to text).
Other than that, I see no issues with the changes through year 5. It's not that hard to read and I'm sure I would quickly get used to it with practice. Past year 5, I don't understand what is happening and I literally can't read it.
It technically needs to be a different letter to mark a "short i", like "й" in Russian or Ukrainian. If we use "ï' for it, the "year" will become "ïear", "yellow" will become "ïellow". The "y" that reads as "i" will just switch to "i", and "my" will become "mai".
... but there are constant dictation exercises (диктанты) in school to force children to memorize the thousands of exceptions in the orthographic rules of literary Russian. A written Russian sentence is (usually) easy to read - but the reverse task, writing down a spoken sentence, can be rather complicated for a child. Especially when the distinction between words and phonemes can seem rather arbitrary in a language full of clitics.
https://sergeytsvetkov-livejournal-com.translate.goog/105625...
> Especially when the distinction between words and phonemes can seem rather arbitrary in a language full of clitics.
Uhh... Russian doesn't have a lot of clitics. There are compound words like in German, but they are still understandable if you read them phonetically.
And most children learn to read first by sounding aloud individual letters, and then just training to do it faster. It's called "reading by syllables".
But Ukrainian is still even better. It's almost completely phonetic both ways and you usually can write down any word you hear without problems, even if you hear it for the first time. There are still some double consonants and a small amount of reduced vowels, but even they are still somewhat reflected phonetically.
It's also completely impractical given the wide variety of very differently pronounced English dialects and accents. In other words, it requires massive pronunciation reform too. If that's on the table, why not alter everyone's pronunciation to fit the orthography...
Updating grammar would be a giant pain in the neck. Saying "we're gonna write 'cat' as 'kat' now sounds a lot simpler. It would also greatly reduce the number of times I'd have to say things like "I'm about to use a word I've read a thousand times but never heard anyone pronounce, so forgive me if I'm butchering it." My kid was hugely into cats as a little kid, and it was cute when they wanted to tell us cool things about lee-oh-pards. It's less cute when I'm in a meeting talking about a whitepaper I've read about something I've never heard spoken.
And this is actually a loss. I have a fantastic edition of the Song of Roland with facing pages in Modern English and Medieval French, and there are nuances that would be lost in a straight translation to either Modern English or Modern French.
https://youtu.be/sa3Tl3t88Mc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/82GgaT0Sx1o
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Standard_German
I wonder how this would affect communities that speak AAVE for example.
At least when you encounter an unknown word in English you can more likely understand it even if you aren't sure how to pronounce it. Languages with periodic spelling adjustments to re-align spelling with (ever shifting) pronunciation strip this info away.
> Spelling in English is so hard we even have a contest for it, the spelling bee!
Pfui. In France there is (or was -- I no longer live there) a popular prime time spelling bee, not just for kids.
That probably seems like an intellectual concern divorced from day-to-day language use, but I think we take for granted how easy it is to figure out a word's meaning from its spelling once one has a grasp of written English. Words we typically think of as being clearly related, and pronounced as basically similar sounds are actually vastly different in basic pronunciation, and, thereby, reforming spelling in this way would eliminate visual relationships between related words that are otherwise totally non-obvious.
And all this to perform a phonological mapping that would be out of date almost as soon as it was settled on. To say nothing of the actual practical concern of arriving at a consensus on which phonemes in which words should be spelt which way, what of the absolute deluge of different accents to be dealt with for instance. That's before we get to the part where now English speakers lose access to all pre-existing literature after about 2 generations. The longer you look at the proposal, the more counter-productive it obviously is.
That has already happened, which is part of how we got into this mess.
See isle vs island.
IMHO The only real solution is to invent a time machine and keep England from getting conquered again and again and again. If you keep mashing languages together you are bound to get a mess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
This is how Turkey ended up with its shallow orthography: the government designed a new alphabet. Before that they used Arabic.