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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

One of the challenges with this is that the phonology of English as spoken varies quite a bit -- even among nearby regions -- particularly with vowels, but sometimes with consonants especially medial ones.

https://youtu.be/sa3Tl3t88Mc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/82GgaT0Sx1o

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Swiss German[1] is a related example for this. Even though Swiss German varieties are mostly unintelligible with Standard German (Hochdeutsch/Standard High German), German writing in Switzerland is mostly done with a variety of Standard German[2]. One of the main causes being, different varieties of Swiss German are so different that it would be difficult choosing a "standard" Swiss German orthography, so a very far variety closer to Standard German is used instead of Swiss German. There are other reasons for this, but this is one of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Standard_German

A challenge, yes, but an insurmountable one? No. There is no fundamental need to keep the written form of a language across various dialects unified. If people can understand each other's accents and dialects when speaking, they can also understand those same differences when expressed through writing (assuming that the writing system is capable of expressing those differences accurately enough, which the current English orthographies are not). In fact, writing in your own dialect and accent in informal contexts (e.g. on social media) is quite common in some language communities, and it doesn't particularly hinder communication. Thus, you could theoretically let the spelling vary by dialect and everything would work out just fine for the most part.

I’ve read phonetic English and it’s really hard at first but you eventually get the hang of it. Are you proposing that people just write out whatever they say in IPA and force the interpretation on the reader like we do with spoken language?

I wonder how this would affect communities that speak AAVE for example.

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