I lost interest as soon as they decided to use digraphs. If you’re going to change spelling, stop uses a letter for more than one sound.
Didn’t even have the guts to eliminate the most useless letter in the entire English alphabet — the C.
Didn’t even have the guts to eliminate the most useless letter in the entire English alphabet — the C.
7 bits are enough for everyone.
"Ø", then, seems like the best choice. (Also, it's the coolest looking diacritic form of "O")
It’s... not. English has words with “q” where:
(1) it is followed by a different vowel than “u”, and ones where
(2) it is followed by a consonant, and ones where
(3) it is the final letter in the word.
It’s funny how people who know English the least are the most confident about the changes that need to be made.
English is how it is because of how English has grown and evolved over the centuries. There are a lot of languages which have influenced English, and we mixed all of those inherited words and their pluralizations into a single language.
Additionally, “sight words” seems to be the most prominent way to teach children how to read today, which is not great for the future, because learning sight words (learning whole words by sight and memorizing them) rather than learning sounds phonetically does not prepare students of English to tackle new words they see in the future.
I was taught phonics in school and I hated those classes but I learned how to read and how to spell because of them.
Anyway, if you learn via phonics, at least for me, somehow, English words and their pronunciation make a lot more sense and you notice all the consistency instead of all the inconsistency.
The standard way to represent /tʃ/ in one letter is "č".
Incidentally, there's a reason the IPA for the sound is /tʃ/. It's two sounds pronounced together, in a manner essentially identical to the /kt/ at the end of the word "act", or the /ts/ at the end of the word "cats".
The parallel is not perfect - in particular, affricates are generally understood as being a single sound, while coarticulated stops are generally thought of as being two sounds in sequence, even where they show all the phonological independence you'd expect of a single phoneme. (Compare e.g. Greek "Ctesias".)
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.
If you want to completely change the orthography of these words to better match the adopted English pronoucations of these words, I'm all for it! I'll get the shampain and the kapaqeno! But you don't get to
No, “direct adoption of foreign words into English” is, in fact, English, as are transliterations adopted into English. (I mean, it's literally ominnthe description.)
If they weren't, the ~1/3 of English vocabulary resulting from the wholesale importing of French after the Norman conquest would be not-English.
But, sure, the rule about “qu” applies to “English” if you adopt a definition of what is “English” that excludes most of the actual language.
Always happy to supply bright ideas to eviscerate English orthography!