I took some text from a CNN article and applied some spelling transformations to make it follow phonetic rules.
After trying to read the above quote:
[ol]
[li]How easy is it to understand what the text is saying?[/li][li]Even if you can understand it, how “jarring” is it for you to see written word spelled this way?[/li][li]Are you a native English speaker? (so we can see how this affects the results)[/li][/ol]
I find it difficult because several of the “simplified” spellings already exist as words in English with vastly different meanings. In the first paragraph alone, “wont,” “reed,” “wail,” and “too” are perfectly good words that don’t have any relationship to the words represented by the standard spellings they mean to replace (“want,” “read,” “while,” and “to”).
I also find it confusing because the simplified spellings are based on a different regional accent than I’m used to. When I see “wail,” I don’t hear the sounds of the word that’s usually spelled “while.” I’m used to hearing “while” pronounced ˈhwī(-ə)l, that is, with a slightly aspirated “h” in front. When I see “wail,” I hear ˈwāl. They don’t even rhyme.
Similarly, I see that the simplified scheme uses “oo” to represent more than one vowel sound. “Too” and “proov” replace “to” and “prove,” but those words use two different sounds. I can’t think of any regional accent in which the vowels in tə and *prüv *sound the same.
Overall, it looks less like a simplified spelling scheme and more like a transcript of what text-to-voice software (think MacTalker from the bad old days) generates.
The words “niu rools” really jumped out at me. There’s regional variation as to whether “new” is pronounced “noo” or “niu”; should we have regional variation in spelling as well? Also, why are you using “s” for the “z” sound in “rools”, but not for “yuz”?
How is wail a phonetic spelling of while? And erlains for airlines? Those are i sounds, not a sounds. And I don’t know how to phonetically spell air, but I don’t pronounce it anything like er.
Maybe this is phonetic for the same people who pronounce oil as ull and New Orleans as n’orluns but for this native English speaker from the Pacific Northwest, I had trouble with more than just the spelling.
A pronounced as in ‘want’ and i pronounced as in ‘thing’. A I. Said as a diphthong. As in the Japanese word ‘ai’.
Don’t look for the idiotic English ‘phonetic spellings’, read them like they’re written in a language with rational spelling - Spanish, or Japanese rendered as romaji, for instance.
But the fact that several pseudo-phonetic spellings leak in and a few words, even aside from the proper nouns (which they’re inconsistent about) get their standard English spellings, despite that not making sense with their pronunciation (electronic, instead of ilektronik (or elektronik), or, conversely, ‘e-book’ instead of ‘ebooc’ frex), as well as no separate character for schwas makes it harder - as well as the fact it’s clearly written to a very different dialect than mine (niu, or see the elektronik/ilektronik thing above). Also, the problem in standard English spellings of characters or characters representing multiple sounds is still there - more characters, and/or accents are needed. (C, X, and Q could be repurposed, once they’re replaced by k/s, ks, and kw, but borrowing characters from IPA and/or the Scandinavian alphabets, or adding accents, diaereses, or macrons are still needed to deal with our serious lack of vowel characters, though diphthongs can handle some of the sounds.)
Rationalized spelling can work. This is a terribly inconsistent attempt at doing so.
Instead of just reading the words, I have to sound each one out in my head to make sense of what its supposed to be. Then I have to string it together with the other words to figure out the whole sentence. The phonetics also seem off to me - ei does not equal a long a in my mind. That’s a lot of effort on my part.
Which, as cwthree mentioned, is another complicating factor…to many words become homographs to standard English spellings which may or may not be spelt the same in the rationalized spelling.
It took me much longer than it does with standard spelling of english. I also hated every second of it. Even my inner voice was jilted because I had to “sound” out each word in my head to realize what the words were, as opposed to simply reading them and understanding innately.
In fact, sounding it out in my head put all the emphasis on the wrong syllables, and that’s why it sounded so jilted.
Also, as others said: accents screw this up a lot.
Native.
If someone wrote a book like this I would want to burn it.
Native speaker. Didn’t find it terribly difficult, though I did find myself reading it with sort of… an accent, if that makes sense. If I had to put a name on the accent, I’d call it Dutch.
Seriously though, it was pretty bad, and I agree with the rest of your post too. My answers to the OP’s questions.
I could understand it, but I had to slow down to sound it out in my mind first. My brain didn’t just register it quickly and automatically the way it would a typo or something.
It was incredibly jarring.
I am a native English speaker.
Strangely, I found myself reading it with a weird accent too. Or perhaps not so strange, as I’m not alone.