| I think natural language designers might also look at the letter frequencies and question why 'E' shows up so much. Is the canonical sound it makes just common in English or is there some problem with its "design"? It turns out E is way overloaded in English: - it's silent in the case of modifying preceding vowels separated by a medial consonant e.g. hat vs. hate, bat vs. bate - and in older English (or English that wants to feel old) was a superfluous final letter e.g. olde, pubbe - as a silent letter entirely e.g. eagle - as itself e.g. egg, education - as a silent or nearly silent suffix separator for -ed e.g. dropped, judged - as a non-silent suffix for -ed e.g. educated - silent as an immediate vowel modifier in vowel digraphs (in some spellings) e.g. archaeology, encyclopaedia, caesar used to be ligatured it was so incidental. - silent as a modifier on itself e.g. teen, feel - one of several representation for schwa, ə e.g. taken (takən), enemy (enəmy) etc. 'e' is a mess. It's mostly silent, either ignored completely or modifying something else (an issue even Benjamin Franklin tried to solve through a proposed spelling reform). It's conflated with schwa (the most common vowel sound in English yet has no singular representation). A language reformer would probably tackle this letter first and fix a great deal of the spelling problems in English. |
You switched to "reformer" in your closing sentence, perhaps that was what you originally meant, too?
Of course, such a reform is not exactly easy to implement.