Yes. Each person would learn to write, phonetically, the wordls the way they pronounce them. Not some “official” way. (Unless we’re going to have an “official” pronunciation emerge from all this).
Within the limits of people’s abilty to understand other English-speaking people who have wildly different accents, you would have a NON-uniform spelling of the English language that English-speakers can understand, or understand as well as they can understand each other.
Nonsense. “Siesm” carries information about the meaning of the word that “sizum” does not. Divorce the word from its spelling, and a person confronted with the word for the first time is as likely to guess that it has something to do with dimension as to make the correct inference about its meaning. This effect is amplified in English, because we have such a large representation of loan words.
The meaning of a word like “androgynous” is clear at a glance, as is a word like “lactigenous.” However, you will note that their suffixes are pronounced identically. Slave your spelling to the sound, and you lose this distinction, and set yourself to be back at square one when the “standard” pronunciation drifts.
Repeating a consonant to modify a preceding vowel doesn’t make much sense. We should either add the extra vowels or use long/short marks on the existing ones. It’s kind of ridiculous to continue using archaic spelling in modern times.
Johnny can’t spell because all his teachers are fags who only want to fuk hym.
I’m probably the only one who read the OP, and heard it in the voice of Billy Bletcher at 3:35. The voice of Owl Jolson is supplied by none other than Tommy “Butch” Bond from “Our Gang.”
OK. . . end of hijack.
Those protesters make a strong case for forced sterilization.
God Hates Homophones
yeah, I know the joke was somewhat alluded to in several previous posts, but, unless I missed something, no one else came up with the exact punchline
The true agenda is revelaed in this video.
It is by no means just sort of foolish to wish for a more sensible spelling system. It’s just that there are a host of complications, and the current system for all its flaws is holding together.
Right. Problem number one, everyone pronounces English differently. You don’t have to jump the ocean to run into a problem with a purely phonetic system. In much of the English speaking world it will suffice to walk across the street.
One solution on the table is to just suck it up and have everybody write it the way they say it – no standardized spelling, just standardized representation of phonemes. I can generally understand a English word spoken by an Australian, though it may be very different in production. But if I read an accurate transcription of that different production, would I recognize its relation to my own word?
Maybe, but… we don’t know. People who are accustomed to looking at IPA transcriptions negotiate these distinctions pretty well. Would a broader population be able to do the same if taught, or is this a facility that comes with the kind of training and underlying pre-occupations that currently lead people to study phonetics? We don’t know. I’d like to see studies trying it out on non-linguist or non-word-nerd types before I’m ready to run off and insist that this is the way to go.
Written language is another country. They do things differently there. The fact that our brains generally manage to compensate for differences in pronunciation in spoken language doesn’t necessarily tell us what they’d do if we saw symbols representing those same differences. Evidence from /337 speak and text messaging suggests to me that our minds are agile with legibility-related phenomena, but let’s not take it too for granted.
Hmmm. I think it’s just you suffering from this shame.
The standard orthography is at least as haphazard and misleading for etymology as it is for pronunciation. Observe the following joke:
Did it flash into your mind that the joke humorously conflates the Latin prefix con- meaning ‘with’ with the Latin preposition contrā meaning ‘against’? Because I submit that most people themselves make the same etymological mistake that the joke makes. Likewise, jokes conflating the Latin word homō meaning ‘human being’ and the Greek prefix homo- meaning ‘same’ derive from the same kind of etymological error reinforced by the choice at some point in history to represent them with the same Latin characters, leading to a merging of pronunciation.
It takes so much extra information to reliably use spelling to trace etymology that the utility nearly disappears. You’d be on stronger footing to argue for phonetic spelling to help curb false etymologies.
So that’s what Claudia Kishi grew up to do with her life!
Claudia who?
Or maybe they’re in league with the Writers Against Piracy?
Babysitters Club ref. 
We cannot spell words they way they sound because words sound differently in the different Englishes around the world. We spell them mostly one way, but pronounce them differently around the world.
Why do we need so many different accents within the same language? Are British English dictionaries different than American ones due to the pronunciation guides? That’s another part of the problem. Let’s standardize pronunciations as well…
Shouldn’t that be the Amerikan Literasy Kownsil and the Speling Sosiety?
Spanish accents change some consonants and stresses, but the vowels don’t change, whereas in English these are all over the place. Most of the differences between Spanish dialects are about vocabulary; sometimes they affect grammar (the different forms of “you” are the big example).
But - Spanish isn’t written phonetically by every Spanish speaker. As per a discussion my Andalusian coworkers were having the other day, in Seville (where I work) they turn the Z into S but not the S into Z, in Dos Hermanas (where I’m living, and it’s the next village south from Seville) they do both. There are areas where terminal Ss become J while Js become aspirated Hs, and others where some Ss are pronounced SH. If you have my accent then yes, you write phonetically; if you’re Andalusian, from Getafe or from a farm in the Basque hills, not so much. And that was all without leaving Peninsular Spain!
Unlike English, where phonetic writing isn’t marked, in Spanish when you write phonetically something which is not “standard phonetics(1)” you’re supposed to use italics (not if you’re using dialectal variations in grammar and vocabulary, only if you’re showing pronunciation).
(1) with my apologies to posters who don’t like this name, but we’ve had this discussion before, y’all know what I mean, and we still haven’t been able to come up with a better expression as far as I can remember. “Official phonetics”?
lighph.
Thus giving us Cole Porter’s “You say to-may-to, I say to-may-to as well 'cause it’s legally mandated…”
I’m still waiting for the metric system version of the alphabet that Dan Aykroyd told us about on Saturday Night Live in the 70s. Someday, maybe I can use the letter “lmnop.”
You people have it all backward. It’s not spelling that’s too complicated. It’s pronunciation that’s too simple.
“Enough” should be pronounced E-no-ug-h. 