[jonathankoren]

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.

[tdeck]

Digraphs are a reasonable tradeoff to simplify text handling IMO but then, why have Ø? Seems to nullify the whole benefit of the other digraphs and leave behind only the downsides.

[vkethana]

I couldn't think of a good digraph for the "OO" in book. The most available option is "OH", but that might mislead readers into thinking "OH" = the "o" in "over" and not the "oo" in book.

"Ø", then, seems like the best choice. (Also, it's the coolest looking diacritic form of "O")

[jonathankoren]

Just drop all the diacritics and go on and live for live music. Also the removal of diacritics and other fancy letters like o-slash simplifies text processing.

7 bits are enough for everyone.

[noduerme]

If you got rid of c, you'd need a new letter for "ch".

[jonathankoren]

No. You need a letter for “ch” regardless. You can just reuse the Q for that. It’s pretty much useless as well. Can’t be used by itself because it’s always in “qu”, and that’s just “kw”

[dragonwriter]

> You can just reuse the Q for that. It’s pretty much useless as well. Can’t be used by itself because it’s always in “qu”.

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.

[jonathankoren]

Those are often transliterations into the latin alphabet or direct adoption of foreign words and therefore are not English. For example, 氣 is only spelled "qi" in pinyin. "Chi" is also a perfectly fine transliteration if you use Wade-Giles. They're equivalent in every respect, except orthography. Same with "koran", "quran", "coran", and "kuran". They're the same word. You don't need the Q. I can say with complete confidence, because Q is not a letter in Arabic. "Sioux" while an American word isn't English either. It's Lakota. The only reason we spell it with an "ioux" instead of an "oo" is because it got transliterated into French.

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

[dragonwriter]

> Those are often transliterations into the latin alphabet or direct adoption of foreign words and therefore are not English.

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.

[jonathankoren]

Missed the whole thing about spelling reforms are about making everything consistent huh?

[naikrovek]

You’re right.

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.

[thaumasiotes]

jonathankoren is correct that Q serves no purpose in English. He's also correct about it only appearing in the cluster /kw/, as long as you recognize that "Iraq", "waqf", "qoppa", etc. are not actually English words. But even in those cases, Q and K are exactly equivalent in written English, because we don't have the uvular consonants present in Arabic. In a reformed spelling, Q would have no place, just as it has no logical place in the other languages that have or could have inherited it from Latin.

The standard way to represent /tʃ/ in one letter is "č".

[naikrovek]

"A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling"

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.

[jonathankoren]

That's just a fancy c. Diacritics are for cowards that are too scared to make a new letter for a sound that doesn't have a single letter.

[rikroots]

Nah. It's an affricate - t͡ʃ - thus (in my opinion) begging out to be a digraph. If we can all agree to replace 'sh' with 'c', then we can all agree to replace 'ch' with 'tc'.

Always happy to supply bright ideas to eviscerate English orthography!