I use a screen reader and in managed quite well until 1200.
That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language with an alphabet.
That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language with an alphabet.
People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes perfect sense. It’s the English pronunciation which is really strange and inconsistent.
BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone. In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade. It's _that_ easy because both alphabets are phonetic (although it's only one-way in case of Russian).
Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize. It was not at all helpful. I also ended up learning English as a mostly written language, so after moving to the US, I kept getting surprised by how familiar written words are actually pronounced.
E.g. it took me a while to explain to a nurse over the phone that I may have pneumonia and need an appointment. Why the heck that leading "p" is completely silent?!?
I used to be able to jot down notes during lectures almost as fast as the normal spoken speed. We often traded notebooks when preparing for the exams, and I rarely had problems reading other people's notes.
It's also really nice to write, once you learn it. I was surprised after moving to the US that almost nobody here knows how to write in cursive anymore.
A part of this is a really terrible cursive variant that schools in the US used to teach ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method ). Modern Russian (and Ukrainian) cursives are closer to the older Spencerian script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script
I also find the hand-wringing about English accents somewhat surprising. Yes, different accents exist, and yes, English has a much wider variation than (urban) Russian (there are things in the countryside that urban dwellers haven’t heard for a century), but phonemic orthographies are a thing, and though children in e.g. Moscow may perpetually struggle with orthographic distinctions that no longer correspond to anything in their accent, the idea of a spelling competition remains about as laughable as that of a shoelace-tying one. Nobody makes you represent the many mergers of English with a single letter in your new orthography (though it would be funny).
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic_alternates...., rightmost column
In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade. If your parents didn't teach you before that, like mine did.
> Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize.
There are rules though, that we're ad-hoc taught as kids, or just absorb through exposure. Just because there's a lot of exceptions doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's an attempt at listing them out: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
I keep hearing that students in the US struggle with reading. With something like 60% of students not being able to read proficiently.
Inlcuding a truly stunning case of a valedictorian high school graduate who couldn't read: https://www.kktv.com/2025/02/28/former-high-school-honors-st... Or the "whole language" approach to reading, which sounds completely bonkers to me.
BS yourself: The English -- e.e. Latin -- alphabet is just as phonetic as any other.
As long as you don't fuck up your pronounciation as thoroughly as English has done.
besides, pronunciation continues to evolve, so any phonetic spelling would continue to gradually diverge from the spoken language
There is no such thing as spelling in phonetic writing systems because they render what is said, not some random collection of glyphs that approximated how a word was pronounced 500 years ago, in the best case.
If two people with different accents can speak to each other, they can also write to each other under a phonetic writing system.
For example, Spanish has a fairly consistent spelling system standardized by RAE, based in Madrid. But, for instance, even though much of Latin America doesn't have a distinction between s and soft c (seseo), they still keep the distinction in its spelling.
Foreign accents don't come from any inherent inability to learn language after X years of age. They come from people pronouncing languages as they are written, and virtually no language is like that in reality.
It's true that when studying a foreign language, learning to read too early can harm your pronunciation. However, it is very difficult to learn new sounds that have no equivalent in your native language, and some languages have very restrictive phonology (like Italian and Japanese requiring a vowel at the end of every word) that their native speakers struggle to break out of.
That's one example, from a language with ~70M native speakers, in a geographically tight region.
Likewise, all your other languages (sans Turkiye) are very compact geographically with small speaker bases. And Turkish undoubtedly has large aspects of forced standardization and dialect extinction.
English is spoken by 1.5 billion, by ESL speakers from basically every language tree, across the world. Try to get folks from Boston, Brooklyn, Philly, and Albany in a room and get them to agree on a phonetic spelling.
The point is that if anyone wanted to reform English spelling, they would have to choose a particular dialect to standardize around.
There is no standard English dialect. There is a relatively standard version of American English ("Walter Cronkite English"), and there is Received Pronunciation in England, but then there are all sorts of other dialects that are dominant elsewhere (Scotland, Ireland, India, etc.).
Which one should we choose to base our orthography on? Or should we allow English spelling to splinter into several completely different systems? Yes, there are already slight differences in British vs. American spelling, but they're extremely minor compared to the differences in pronunciation.
And after this spelling reform, will people still be able to read anything written before the reform, or will that become a specialized ability that most people don't learn?
That would make reading anything extremely slow and difficult.
You're proposing to make reading just as difficult as understanding every other dialect of spoken English - something even most native speakers have difficulty with.
Your proposal would also eliminate whole-word recognition, which is what makes reading fast. It would slow us all down to the speed of young children just learning to sound out the letters.
American English isn’t the only spelling of English.
English is probably overdue on that, tbh.
Yet people who speak those dialects can write anything down and I'll understand it perfectly with no effort.
You don't understand the value of standardization. It's what makes reading fast and independent of dialect. People who read English don't literally sound out the letters. They recognize the whole word instantly. Sounding out the letters is only a fallback mechanism.
What you're proposing might work for a tiny language with only one main dialect. English is a global language with a huge number of dialects. Major languages like this need standardized writing systems, and to no one's surprise, they all have them.
English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
That someone in a two sheep village in Scotland might have trouble reading War and Peace isn't a reason to abuse every child for a decade before they too develop the same brain damage as the adults who abused them.
But you don't have to go all the way to "English should switch to hieroglyphs" to see that keeping a uniform but imperfect phonetic system is far superior to having everyone write their own partially intelligible dialect however they want.
> English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
I assume you mean going East from Vancouver, because there are practically no major population centers practically in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
But no, the dialects spoken in the major English-speaking population centers are not mutually intelligible. An American exposed to Cockney, a major English dialect, for the first time will have no idea that is being said.
Here's the future you want:
"Ai fink va braan kye-ao iz ow-va ve-ya bai va waw-ʔuh."
How many Americans do you think will understand that at first sight?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
> Around 1809, ... Sequoyah began work to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. ... He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he originally created.
> After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society.[4] By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography. ...
> Albert Gallatin ... believed [the syllabary] was superior to the English alphabet in that literacy could be easily achieved for Cherokee at a time when only one-third of English-speaking people achieved the same goal.[6] He recognized that even though the Cherokee student must learn 85 characters instead of 26 for English, the Cherokee could read immediately after learning all the symbols. The Cherokee student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing might require two years to achieve.
I've created a Firefox Add-on for it as well.
Do you mean that since English isn't phonetically spelled, that which we call the alphabet is rather arbitrary?
English has 45 sounds and 26 letter. There are basically no words over three letter long that are written as they are spoken.
Serbian has an alphabet, as does Italian. All other European languages I'm aware of don't.
...ok, it occurs to me now that a smart-alec might declare each individual word to be a "grouping of letters with its own phonetic pronounciation", whereupon phoneticism as-defined is achieved trivially because pronounciation is universal over the singleton universe of words spelt exactly like that word. You know what I _mean_ - "sufficiently small groups of letters", hand-wave.