UKC

English is full of weird rules, weird spellings, exceptions and stupid things like silent letters. One of the huge benefits of English versus other languages is that it's almost phonetic - which means we don't have scenarios where a small room of people can collectively not know how to write down the word 'sneeze'.*

- I'd get rid of ALL silent letters and make everything properly phonetic - nife out yor frend's nee. One of the first words for a child to learn (friend), half of them can't even spell because of that useless i - the number of people learning English who keep saying 'freend' as well...

- Copy Spanish and put the exclamation and question marks at the start of the sentence. Not doing that is like reading a sentence only to find out it was a quote at the end. You're stupid" is a mean thing to say <- see, almost looked like I called you stupid.

- Copy Welsh (?) or Maori - Vowels get modified in place either using macrons [bars over letters] or a spelling change. This avoids going down the garden path ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence ) e.g. cone becomes - cōn or coen.

* - http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

There is a lot of work to do around "...ough"

Shouldn't be working on furlough though.

having 5 letters for vowels to describe about 15 different sounds.

Russian has 10. Welsh has none

It can't be saved - get rid of it!. tuff fesants went thru tho. 

It all falls down on vowel sounds.

I'm quite happy with path, glass and bath, but half of England would want to write parth, glarss and barth.

Let's not even look at U. I'd write rucksack whereas those who would write glarss would be much happier with something like recksack or racksack.

Let's leave it as is!

You're right, the problem with phonetic spelling is that the UK's heavy regional accents would play havoc with it!

English isn't very phonetic really - there are at least a dozen ways to spell the 'sh' sound for instance. A very messy language - I suspect there are few candidates for a less phonetic language

A valid point, but there are usually clues at the start ('how...','what...' etc) - and we generally seem to manage well enough in conversation, where the rising inflection indicating a query (or warning of antipodean heritage) doesn't come till the end either

Easily solved. Just make them all speak the Queens English on pain of death.

The French seem to mostly completely miss off saying the 2nd half of their words, which given thats where the tense is located, makes it pretty tricky

I would just adopt Welsh with Latin for special occasions.

Manderin! Although I get your point, out of those languages with an alphabet English must be one of the least phonetic ones. 

My sister was subjected to ITA during her early school years.

An experiment best not repeated.

No way! The phonetics are about as random as you can get. Take the "o" in "combine (harvester)"/"(to) combine"/"comb"; "woman"/"women"; "both"/"bothy"; "lose"/"rose"; "do"/"go"... the list is endless. We assimilate it all automatically, but anyone learning English as a new language has basically to check the pronunciation of every single new word. Many other languages have very consistent phonetic rules; the downsides for us can be e.g. having to learn genders and cases for all nouns, something which we're completely unused to, or seemingly weird sentence structures. 

Edit: spelling misteak  

Written English is not very phonetic - compare it with Spanish for example which is much simpler for us English speakers to write and pronounce what is written down.

Yes I'd love to make our language to be spelt phonetically.  

But how would you spell these?  :- The Bow you fire arrows from, the Bow you tie your shoes up with and the Bow when you bend your body and head forward.  And the Bough  of a tree?

One of the huge benefits of English is its enormous concision and subtlety but I accept it's difficult to learn well as a second language.  But then so is French, not to mention Japanese, Mandarin or Welsh!  

We can all agree on 'sak' though - that's that silent c doing?

bо̄ (written without fancy o as either boe or boo - not sure), beu, bau - something like that? Pretty sure these are not too far off how other European languages would write those sounds.

It's very close to phonetic. If you said all those letters individually and sort of morphed them together, you'd get basically the correct sound. The trouble for people learning English is we don't write down whether a vowel is soft or hard and we occasionallyuse a 'modifier' after the next consonant to retrospectively make the vowel hard. It's that back-tracking of 2 letters and inconsistency that can be fixed.
The word both would perhaps be better written as bо̄th or using the later-modifier - bothe

New one:

Double letters that don't do anything if you write down whether a vowel is hard or soft (I think...). Words like committee, embarrass (I always spell it wrong - every single time ;_; ), questionnaire, occurrence, accommodate.

Can't resist bringing up the famous demonstration of just how irregular English orthography is: "ghoti" pronounced "fish". Often misattributed to Shaw. Speaking as someone who spent thirty years as a secondary school English teacher, I think it's a real stretch to claim that English is "close to phonetic."

I think regional accents is a complete red herring. For instance Italian has a range of dialects (ie accent plus vocab) that is at least as wide as English - try Venetian! - but this doesn't stop it having a far more regular and phonetic spelling system.

But my major gripe as an ex-teacher is English's ridiculous homophones: to/too/two; their/there/they're; pair/pear etc etc. No doubt some will claim that this is justified because of the different meanings, but the sense is almost always absolutely clear from the context. Talk about setting kids up to fail when it comes to literacy! It's time to cast them all into oblivion (the homophones, not the kids).

I'd get rid of certain expletives, starting with the 4-letter ones f**k and C**t...

Have to be careful with some words though, as 'Come' would be changed to 'Cum' and then we'd all be in a right sticky mess of our own doing.

Would you expect rucksack to be pronounced rucksack or racksack?

For example I was in a shop in Buxton, the woman on the till (I assume from her age and accent she was a student) said to he manager (who had just asked if she wanted to go for her break) replied "I'll wait until the rash has died down" I thought 'what a trooper!'

Your post sounds a little homophonic

Why? they're easy to spell, there's not a lot af ambiguity there at all!

I'd hoped it was homophonphobic.

I'd expect them to be pronounced differently in different regions, but be spelled the same. There's absolutely no need for a sensible orthography to be strictly phonetic - that's the preserve of technical linguistic notation. As I said above, you'll find words pronounced very differently in different regions of France, Italy etc - but they're spelled the same, and that system of spelling is far more regular than in English.

All I really want from English spelling is for the same sound within the most "standard" dialect ("BBC English" if you like) always to be spelled the same. There's no good reason for having both "sh" and "ti" to represent the same sound and that's true irrespective of accent.

Er.. Welsh has two more vowels than the English. A E I O U W Y.

Y can also be used as a consonant.

This whole subject reminds me of the poem with the lines:

Beware of heard, a dreadful word

That looks like beard and sounds like bird. 

And dead, it’s said like bed not bead -

For goodness sake don’t call it deed!

Can’t think of the name of this humerous and perceptive piece! Will look it up. 

Initial search suggests it doesn’t have a title and is not attributed to a certain writer/poet. It starts:

I take it you already know 

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you,

On hiccough, thorough, Lough and through. 

And so so it goes on. 

Reminds me of this, which was doing the rounds by email years ago...

The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for short).

In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard "c" will be replaced with "k". Not only will this klear up
konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.

There will be growing public enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse  of  the new spelling kan be expekted  to  reach  the  stage  where  more  komplikated  changes are possible. Governments  will enkorage  the removal  of double  letters, which have  always ben  a deterent  to akurate  speling. Also,  al wil agre  that  the  horible  mes  of  silent  "e"s  in  the  languag   is disgrasful, and they would go.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" by z" and "w" by " v".

During  ze  fifz  year,  ze  unesesary  "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou", and similar changes  vud of kors  be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.

Ze drem vil finali kum tru

English is well known for being one of the least phonetically consistent European languages!

Dearest creature in Creation,
Studying English pronunciation,
⁠I will teach you in my verse
⁠Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
It will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
⁠Tear in eye your dress you'll tear.
⁠So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer,
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it?
⁠Just compare heart, beard and heard,
⁠Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain,
(Mind the latter, how it's written!)
⁠Made has not the sound of bade,
⁠Say—said, pay—paid, laid, but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
⁠But be careful how you speak,
⁠Say break, steak, but bleak and streak,
Previous, precious; fuchsia, via;
Pipe, snipe, recipe and choir,
⁠Cloven, oven; how and low;
⁠Script, receipt; shoe, poem, toe,
Hear me say, devoid of trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
⁠Typhoid; measles, topsails, aisles;
⁠Exiles, similes, reviles;
Wholly, holly; signal, signing;
Thames; examining, combining;
⁠Scholar, vicar and cigar,
⁠Solar, mica, war and far.
From "desire": desirable—admirable from "admire";
Lumber, plumber; bier but brier;
⁠Chatham, brougham; renown but known,
⁠Knowledge; done, but gone and tone,
One, anemone; Balmoral;
Kitchen, lichen; laundry, laurel;
⁠Gertrude, German; wind and mind;
⁠Scene, Melpomene, mankind;
Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
⁠This phonetic labyrinth
⁠Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.
Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet;
⁠Blood and flood are not like food,
⁠Nor is mould like should and would.
Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which is said to rime with "darky".
⁠Viscous, viscount; load and broad;
⁠Toward, to forward, to reward,
And your pronunciation's O.K.
When you say correctly croquet;
⁠Rounded, wounded; grieve and sieve;
⁠Friend and fiend; alive and live;
Liberty, library; heave and heaven;
Rachel, ache, moustache; eleven.
⁠We say hallowed, but allowed;
⁠People, leopard; towed, but vowed
Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover,
⁠Leeches, breeches; wise, precise;
⁠Chalice but police and lice.
Camel; constable, unstable;
Principle, disciple; label;
⁠Petal, penal and canal;
⁠Wait, surmise, plait, promise; pal.
Suit, suite, run, circuit, conduit
Rime with "shirk it" and "beyond it",
⁠But it is not hard to tell,
⁠Why it's pall, mall, but Pall Mall.
Muscle, muscular; gaol; iron;
Timber, climber; bullion, lion,
⁠Worm and storm; chaise, chaos, chair;
⁠Senator, spectator, mayor.
Ivy, privy; famous, clamour
And enamour rime with "hammer."
⁠Pussy, hussy and possess.
⁠Desert, but dessert, address.
Golf, wolf; countenance; lieutenants
Hoist, in lieu of flags, left pennants.
⁠River, rival; tomb, bomb, comb;
⁠Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rime with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
⁠Soul, but foul and gaunt, but aunt;
⁠Font, front, wont; want, grand, and, grant,
Shoes, goes, does.[1]) Now first say: finger,
And then: singer, ginger, linger.
⁠Real, zeal; mauve, gauze and gauge;
⁠Marriage, foliage, mirage, age.
Query does not rime with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
⁠Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth;
⁠Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath.
Though the difference seems little,
We say actual, but victual,
⁠Seat, sweat, chaste, caste; Leigh, eight, height;
⁠Put, nut; granite, but unite.
Reefer does not rime with "deafer,"
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
⁠Dull, bull; Geoffrey, George; ate, late;
⁠Hint, pint; senate, but sedate;
Scenic, Arabic, pacific;
Science, conscience, scientific;
⁠Tour, but our, and succour, four;
⁠Gas, alas and Arkansas!
Sea, idea, guinea, area,
Psalm; Maria, but malaria;
⁠Youth, south, southern; cleanse and clean;
⁠Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion with battalion,
⁠Sally with ally; yea, ye,
⁠Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.
⁠Never guess—it is not safe;
⁠We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf!
Heron; granary, canary;
Crevice, and device, and eyrie;
⁠Face but preface, but efface,
⁠Phlegm, phlegmatic; ass, glass, bass;
Large, but target, gin, give, verging;
Ought, out, joust and scour, but scourging;
⁠Ear, but earn; and wear and tear
⁠Do not rime with "here", but "ere".
Seven is right, but so is even;
Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen;
⁠Monkey, donkey; clerk and jerk;
⁠Asp, grasp, wasp; and cork and work.
Pronunciation—think of psyche!—
Is a paling, stout and spikey;
⁠Won't it make you lose your wits,
⁠Writing "groats" and saying groats?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel,
Strewn with stones, like rowlock, gunwale,
⁠Islington and Isle of Wight,
⁠Housewife, verdict and indict!
Don't you think so, reader, rather,
Saying lather, bather, father?
⁠Finally: which rimes with "enough,"
⁠Though, through, plough, cough, hough, or tough?
Hiccough has the sound of "cup"......
My advice is—give it up!

Sperfick asis. Gerrid o Nout and Bashem as canna Ewesit  or spel proper.

The road signs are very tight with them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. 

I'dgetridofspacestheyjustuseuproomthatcouldbeusedformorecontent. 

In the grand scheme of things, it's 95% phonetic. Compare it to Chinese in the article I linked above.

What do you mean by our language  is 95% phonetic??

Are you  referring to its written form?  Have you come across French which is difficult ? Or Spanish which is very easy for most English speakers to pronounce following their spelling and has very few problematic spellings or odd irregular spellings.  

When I taught English as a foreign language there was very little any of the eastern European students I worked with, could pronounce properly.  Even my Spanish bi-lingual grandson who was fluent in spoken English could not pronounce  written English very well, let alone read and understand it and that was entirely down to the fact the spelling & phonetics were so irregular.!!

English is a mongrel language which bears the influences of all the language groups which have occupied it (Celtic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norman French) with borrowings from languages of the many places it has occupied or whose people have immigrated, and any other useful words picked up from anyone we've bumped into along the way.  Spellings often reflect these origins more than their pronunciation, and can sometimes be a useful pointer to their meaning. Ironically, it is where these spelling become simplified that we often end up with confusing homonyms.  

By comparison, Spanish is a relatively pure language largely descended from Latin dialects and with comparatively few outside influences, Moorish Arabic being perhaps the most influential.  

Spanish also has only 5 vowel sounds, whereas English has around 20.  Replacing the 5 vowel letters in written English with separate letters to represent each of these sounds would make the written language unrecognisable, and that's before we get onto tackling inconsistent consonants and letter combinations. I doubt that would make it any easier for ESOL learners or even native speakers.

Many advocates of English spelling reform would not propose representing each vowel sound with a separate letter, they would simply aim to standardise the letter combinations used. Eg picking one of: route/cute/shoot (or chute!)/fruit/beaut… etc etc.

Let's get rid of all the Jonny Foreigner words we've had to endure over the centuries. I'm sick of all the Welsh, Latin, German, Danish, Norse, French not to mention that goddam American stuff. Then we can just grunt at one another.

This problem of phoneme transliteration is fundamental and the thread seems to forget our North American friends who also speak English. I've just been watching  a program in which an American archaeologist described Tunisia in the Roman period as furrtle, which reminded me of a Canadian friend  who proclaimed  a route  aarsum, to which I replied the view at the top was reel purrty

Purrdy, surely?

Gadewch i ni i gyd siarad Cymraeg

Driving through Wales, I was always surprised how many villages were called Araf.

Yep, I stand corrected.

I don't think we need to consider their views on modernizing and fixing historcial small inefficiencies if they still haven't updated to the metric system.

English very specific on tense, French less so. 

Has always seemed to me English swear words have a lot more power than French ones, which has equivalents. They are just not as offensive, or offense isn't taken by them. 

I would add an equivalent to the french Si, for agreeing to a negative question. 

I always wondered where Heddlu was.

I share your lack of understanding French. Sonmany words end with a sound roughly like ay in English but can be spelt é, ais, ait, ez and probably some more I can't remember just now.

You must be a little slow

No doubt he called it rout too.

I thought it was the k that was silent.

What about the standard way of spelling led on UKC like the metal? Well, there are still a few of us traditionalists.

The true traditionalists were all into Lead Zeppelin.

I'd keep it in all its wonderful complexity. To get by English can be used at quite a basic level and still works but it's the gift that keeps on giving. 

And I still can't understand what "nife out yor frend's nee" means. Translation? 

Or the German equivalent, "doch" - a really useful addition to a language, and one which is sadly lacking in ours.

I'm over simplifying, but...Italian: approx. 25 basic sounds, spelled approx. 35 different ways; English: 40 sounds, spelled around 1,000 different ways. I'm not sure many of the generations of kids I taught felt filled with wonder at that complexity. Ridiculous irregularity of spelling adds nothing to the beauty, power and nuance of the language. In my view it's got that way because of the traditional British laziness when it comes to languages: too many of us can't be bothered to learn a foreign language, and too many of us can't be bothered to keep our own in good nick. I write as the ex-head of a secondary specialist Language College that taught French and German to all, with Spanish as an additional option, and gave all kids an introduction to Mandarin via our links with Chinese schools.

Slightly off topic, but this French translator cracks me up!

youtube.com/watch?v=muP_pP3Em2o&

Literally translated it breaks down into the Peace Horde.

I like the silent letters, and always enjoy spelling things out in phone calls along the lines of "that's 'k' for knife, 'p' for psychiatrist, 'x' for xylophone" etc. etc.

But... for the singular, which is most of the time (use on for nous) , and a specific tense they all sound the same. Irregular a bit different, but there aren't many.

Changed the world for me, when I was living there, and worked that out. 

I think the irregularity of spelling DOES add to the beauty, power and nuance...

It's an organic language that's evolved over thousands of years, not a government construct designed from the ground up to be accessible (Esperanto anyone?).

I don't really see how a surge in the English learning foreign languages would lead to it changing much (other than the continuing incorporation of foreign words)? Attempts to change it will, equally, be slow and organic rather than down to a petition on change.org or indeed the best efforts of teachers such as your good self.

Many's the time I've embarked on a sentence, in measured anticipation  of its mundane termination , only to get to the end and be outraged that it ended......dramatically.!

Not.

Our swear words must be superior because other languages seem to like borrowing them or at least interjecting bits of our profanity intpo their own sentences.

I never knew I needed that

The random spelling.... a real barrier for a lot of people and the bane of my life pre IT.

It’s just down the road from Llwybr Cyhoeddus and twinned with Senso Unico in Italy.

As a student and teacher of linguistics over many years, I find the irregularities and the etymology encoded therein perpetually fascinating - but I don't believe they add anything to the expressiveness of the language, so we very much differ there.

My point about British indifference to MFL learning, was that this is one aspect of a general lack of interest in language, which means that we have not taken enough pride in our own and so have not continually refined and improved its spelling. We have no equivalent to the Académie Française, Real Academia Española or Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung. There's certainly an irony here, given the glories we have contributed to world literature - but I guess it's only one of many in the British national character and culture!

Didn't you? 

A neat illustration of a particularly English attitude to language (and beyond). English does have some cracking swear words, but not sure that means they 'must' 'be superior'.  Languages aren't mutually exclusive entities either and are living things that interact with other languages in the real world. It is not unusual for a language to use 'our' words in 'their' language. This is something that adds versatility and subtlties to English itself, with it's words of similar meanings but often different tone or slant, that exist to a large extent because of the influence of a range of languages on it through history. It is also part of the reason for the diverse spellings, which although often causing difficulty to both those learning the language and first language speakers, does add something to the language in the transparency with which links can be seen between words within and without the language.

All languages are all equally important and valid, and all are living entities that add to the knowledge, understanding and colour of the world.

This is nonsense, I love the English language, but how exactly can bad spelling add to the power and beauty of a language.

Other languages are organic and have evolved in exactly the same way, it is just the spelling of the words that has been standardised.  I can barely speak Spanish at all but I can probably spell it about as well as i can English, this is awesome and inspires me to keep learning.

English speakers are blessed that the rest of the world wants to learn their language, why is it too much to consider improving some of our most perverse spellings?

I love all Bill Brysons books but this is perhaps my favourite.  The Mother Tongue - English And How It Got That Way

https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-That/dp/0380715430

Haven't trawled through looking, but has anyone mentioned the made up word "ghoti" which can be pronounced "fish" if you try really hard?

Was going to suggest that 'gullible' be removed, but it appears that it already has.