The Chicago Tribune, normally a relentlessly conservative newspaper, was progressive in one way: spelling reform.
THE TRIBUNE this week [in 1939] adds twenty-four words to a list of words which it long has spelled in a manner harmonizing with sane trends toward simpler spelling of the English language.
The new selections are:
advertisment for advertisement
analog for analogue
canceled for cancelled
catalog for catalogue
controled for controlled
controler for controller
cotilion for cotillion
decalog for decalogue
definitly for definitely
demagog for demagogue
dialog for dialogue
drouth for drought
extoled for extolled
fantom for phantom
fulfilment for fulfillment
harken for hearken
hocky for hockey
indefinitly for indefinitely
monolog for monologue
patroled for patrolled
pedagog for pedagogue
prolog for prologue
skilful for skillful
tranquility for tranquillity
Some of those eventually received public approval but the paper finally relented in its crusade.
You must ofter have thought English spelling
is harder than need be. Just look at words like
cough, plough, rough, through and thorough. The
great writer Bernard Shaw wanted us to change
out alphabet. Here is one way of doing it.
In the first year, for example, we would suggest
using “s” instead of soft “c”. Sertainly all students
in all sities of the land would reseive this news
with joy.
BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE PRONOUNCED, DAMMIT! </angry prescriptivist>
That’s the real pitfall of any orthography, whether traditionally idiomatic or “new, improved, reformed, simplified”: it always embeds a lot of unsupportable assumptions about pronunciation that the slightest dialectal variation will cheerfully demolish.
I don’t see that in Wiktionary. Wiktionary says the pronunciation in the US and UK is /dɹaʊt/ but notes that the archaic spelling “drouth” is still used in Scotland and northern England, and says “The pronunciation with /θ/ properly belongs with this now archaic doublet.”
The OED agrees that the standard pronunciation ends with /t/ but that the /θ/ pronunciation is used in Scotland.
Oh you’re looking at the archaic spelling “drouth”. Yes, that was pronounced with /θ/ but that spelling (and pronunciation) is not used anymore except in Scotland and in poetry. The link I gave is to the modern word “drought”.
Perfect is the enemy of the good. To be sure, it’s probably impossible to arrive at something that will require no changes between dialects but I’d submit that there’s a lot of room to improve the phonetic qualities of written English that doesn’t make it a veritable subset of the IPA and which still gives us a shared word between dialects for 99%+ of all words.
You don’t need to get that last 1%. Dictionary writers can note alternate spellings of a word, by dialect, just as they do alternate pronunciations today.