[noosphr]

You suffer from the typical brain damage caused by using a language without an alphabet.

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.

[DiogenesKynikos]

That's kind of a mean and not very relevant response.

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?

[noosphr]

You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can understand how people speak you will understand how they write.

[DiogenesKynikos]

So you want a thousand different writing systems, or everyone just winging it as they go along?

That would make reading anything extremely slow and difficult.

[withinboredom]

Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Define "worked."

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.

[withinboredom]

Right. Because everyone gets confused when you write behavior instead of behaviour or license/licence or analyze/analyse. It’s so confusing that there are already different ways to spell the same thing.

American English isn’t the only spelling of English.

[noosphr]

And yet we manage it with speaking. This is why I call it brain damage. It's like trying to explain red to a blind woman.

[DiogenesKynikos]

We don't really manage it with speaking. I don't understand highland Scottish dialects at all. I have trouble understanding Cockney.

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.

[noosphr]

This is the argument that Chinese use for keeping their characters. It's ultimate expression is defending electric motor to be written as "lighting clouds power tree table" because if we didn't then it would be anarchy.

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.

[sheept]

Then under your definition there must not be any widely used written language with an alphabet. Most of the world's alphabetic writing systems aren't phonetic transcriptions, they're standardized. They're usually based on the prestige dialect, at the cost of diminutizing other dialects.

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.

[noosphr]

One I can say for sure is Serbian. Italian looks like it does. Finnish, Hungarian, Georgian, Armenian, Albanian, Turkish and Korean are all ones I've heard are to a lesser or greater degree, but I don't know enough to say either way.

[kortex]

Standard Italian speakers in Rome struggle to understand Ciociaro dialect, which is from the region on the outskirts of Rome. Take "n'coppa" - spelled with a "c" but very much pronounced /ŋgopa/ with a voiced [g]. I dont even have a reference point for Sicilian but that really pushes the bounds of the dialect/language distinction.

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.

[accidentallfact]

People always overestimate how 'phonetic' their language is, because nobody actually uses phonemes in regular speech. In Korean in particular, there doesn't even seem to be any obvious correspondence between what is written, and what is actually said.

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.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Foreign accents come from both.

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.

[eesmith]

The best case is a syllabary with how the word was pronounced a few years previous.

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.