[pavlov]

English spelling could be significantly improved by adding a few optional accents. They could be purely additive: the ASCII spellings would remain valid for those who prefer to use them.

Native English speakers don’t seem to quite grasp how difficult the spelling is. I’ve been using this language for thirty years and I sometimes forget how some basic words are pronounced because I mostly write it.

There’s no need to change physical keyboards. In the smartphone era, most English around the world is already being typed using soft keyboards and autocomplete. A spelling reform could be agreed between Google, Apple and Microsoft. They are the de facto equivalent of Académie Française for the English language, even if they don’t use that power.

Here’s my basic suggestion for the optional accent marks:

A long vowel is marked with an acute accent. The sound is simply the one you’re familiar with from how the alphabet is pronounced. This lets us distinguish between léad (the verb) and lead (the metal), live (the verb) and líve (as in streaming), lów and how, féar and bear, bléak and break, infinite and fíníte, etc.

It also fixes the spelling of many loan words that look like the final e would be silent and today you just have to know it’s not: catastrophé, epitomé, Eurydicé, etc.

This easy rule doesn’t nearly cover all the weird vowel spellings, but it already fixes a substantial part of the worst obstacles for English learners.

Two more accent marks could be deployed:

The macron is already familiar to Japanese learners. It’s a long version of the short vowel sound, as in Ōsaka. The spelling of many English loan words could be unified by deploying the macron consistently. It would allow replacing é with ē in French loan words like fiancē.

The grave accent could be used to assign a third vowel sound, but it’s not as obvious what this should be. As an example, maybe for the letter A, it could be the sound in words like àll and hàul and àwe. Again, the point would be to give a consistent and useful hint of a sound that doesn’t follow the basic rules, not to make the spelling perfect in one stroke.

[jayarel]

Traditional Spelling Revised is more fulsome version of your accent/remediation scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Spelling_Revised. Here's my 9 minute dialog with the creator of Traditional Spelling Revised, Steven Linstead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPHDh7mrBnY

[pushedx]

You have joined a time honored tradition of attempting to fix English spelling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...

[ASalazarMX]

I have the impression that it is indeed broken, but even if there was a worldwide generational effort to fix it, USA would stubbornly remain in their old ways as a matter of national pride.

[dullcrisp]

This seems like a good idea that isn't likely to catch on widely, but could maybe be deployed in places like the Simple English Wikipedia and other contexts where non-native English speakers are a major part of the target audience.

[akovaski]

> Native English speakers don’t seem to quite grasp how difficult the spelling is.

We're well aware. This is why we have spelling competitions and why spellcheck is included everywhere. Native English speakers regularly use spellcheck. Some people even forego standard English spelling and just spell stuff as they want.

There are many things I could say about optionally adding accents to clarify some vowel pronunciations, but the worst case scenario would probably be if it actually gained traction. https://xkcd.com/927/