The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing.
I wish this would have taken off (Maybe even giving us a gender neutral pronoun?).
Sadly, we'll need a dictator like Sejong the Great to make it happen.
With most text being read on a screen now days, phones and computers could have a button to switch between spelling systems.
Sadly, it'll never happen.
I'm sure it can be easily be trained to with enough samples just like it knows any other language, but for now it seems a good way to know you are reading a human generated text.
I’d distrust any top-down effort to change a language anyway. It belongs to the users and they’ll adapt it to their needs the way they see fit.
For my Pacific Northwest accent, either pronunciation works fine.
Well, it's worse than that, because English speakers don't agree on how words sound.
So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place ... but not for all instances of those vowel sounds in all words. Some people like to add r's that aren't there, but there's a few places to do it.
You'd need a much tighter language community to enforce consistent enough pronunciation that a phonetic alphabet would work. And you'd be giving up centuries of printed works to do it.
We can’t agree in my house how to pronounce “bath” so how will the entire English speaking world agree on the spelling of every such word with consistent meaning but differing pronunciation…
Which is how the language functioned before the printing press.
They, as you probably know, is 3rd person plural.
You might look up the history of thee, thou, and you. And then consider why y'all is taking the world by storm.
Sweden has "hen". I often use it while writing
We have one: ‘it.’ What we don’t have is a specific indistinct-gender pronoun; instead, English uses ‘he’ (and in a very limited case, ‘they’).
We have those. "He/him/his" are gender-neutral pronouns in English. People simply assume they are male-only, but that isn't true.
People will assume the male gender even if it's technically correct.