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Comment by throw310822 | Hacker News Reader

I always thought the exact opposite would be helpful: don't touch the alphabet but instead teach a fluent phonetic system in which each single letter has a sound and each word can be pronounced exactly as it's written. Remembering the spelling of a word is as easy as remembering its sound in the alternative phonetic system.

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So if you want to remember how to spell "phone", you first have to remember "puh-hon-eh"? I'm not sure that'd be an improvement. How do you even make a phonetic word out of something like "rough"?

The problem will always be that that English has a lot more phonemes than it does letters, so a 1:1 mapping will never be possible. That said, I do think it would be a good idea to have a 1:1 correlation. Which is why everybody should just learn Esperanto instead.[1]

1: Joking.[2]

2: Well, mostly joking.

Phone: phoh-neh

Rough: ro-uh-g

Not that hard. Not perfect either (hs are difficult to pronounce) but still helpful. It could easily become a game for children to talk to each other in this "secret language". And by doing so, they would be memorising the correct spelling of the words.

How would this account for wildly different regional accents?

Or changes over time.

> Or changes over time.

In German, this problem is solved by the convention that the written form exists to preserve the "correct" pronounciation. So, if you don't speak the word in the way it is written, you likely pronounced it wrong (yes, there exist situation where the pronounciation cannot fully be reconstructed from the written word; also newer loanwords tend to be written as in the original language; but these are rather exceptions).

Phonemics is more important than phonetics for these things. Sometimes two sounds need to be represented with the same letter if they are similar and their difference is context-dependent.

Then there's also the etymology and handling of grammatical endings. Polish spelling would be more difficult without "rz" for example, despite its two sounds already existing elsewhere in the spelling system.

Having a language in which the exact same letter(s) make different sounds only based on context is absurd.

Spanish, for example: everything is spelled exactly the way it sounds, a sane design.

The pronunciation of C in Spanish is context dependent. Before I or E, it shares the same sound as S. Before A, O, or U, the same sound as QU.

Or how about G? It makes one sound before I or E, another before A, O, UE, or UI, and yet another before UA.

Lots of folks think their language is simpler, but it's only because they can follow the rules so well they don't need to actually know them.

I think the point is that you can derive the pronunciation from the spelling (though not, arguably, the other way round).

"Context dependent" here means a different thing than it means in English, where the pronunciation of letters depends on the word they're in, without any hard rule. To the point of being pronounced in different ways even in homonyms: e.g. "tear" noun and "tear" verb.

The fact that there are a few rules on how to pronounce combinations of letters (and even a few exceptions here and there) has nothing to do with the total mess that is English.

Would it be sane to have a special letter to distinguish the "p" in "park" from the "p" in "spark"? In some languages, it's important, but these two sounds can be represented by the same letter in others because they don't "compete" for the same contexts.

(the difference is aspirate vs. non-aspirate)

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