Otherwise, you couldn’t
Point taken. We kan use C for this and get rid of the CH combination. Curc. Cop. Cess. Coo-coo. 
And while we’re at it, we split the TH kombination, restoring separate letters for its two voised and unvoised sounds, and bring back the Thorn and Eth letters from Old English.
It’s not as though you’re the first to consider this issue. Ben Franklin prodded Webster to do the same thing. They succeeded in some ways (color vs. colour), but in the end people apparently didn’t want to avoid confusion in some areas when reading. (Reading wasn’t exactly the equivalent of TV today.)
Also, while, as noted by
Whoosh not withstanding, to think in terms of phonemes (and ignore phonology, when we put all these sounds together in an utterance), seems to me to ignore the nuance that any human language naturally has. English has chosen the use of various letters to do so in writing, apparently (Shakespeare certainly did so).
Human language isn’t about “efficiency”–that is to say, saying the most information with the least writing or utterance. (Maybe WF Tomba isn’t human–then, my apologies.)
I agree with you. I don’t really think we should write with numbers. My (veiled) point was the same as yours, that our writing system was developed without much concern for efficiency of expression. To me, minor spelling reforms are sort of like making little alterations to a 737 to improve its highway mileage.
Edit: That’s not such a good analogy, since the 737 was carefully engineered for a specific purpose while the alphabet was not. Substitute “butternut squash” for “737” and “effectiveness as a bowling ball” for “highway mileage”.
And what about poor Apu?
"Who needs a _wik-E-Mart?
I do…"
How else would one differentiate between Blue and Black in an RGB / CMYK situation? I should know.
Maybe the question is not to get rid of the letter “K” (which I happen to be fond of), but maybe introduce the letter “‡”. Sounds kind of like “H”, but not.
Also, What’s with “Y” sometimes gallivanting around like a vowel? All vowels have their own unique long and short sound. I see “Y” more as a consonant cross-dresser. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But we all kinda feel uncomfortable around rhythm, nonetheless.
And Q is just too far up in the alphabet in my opinion. What’s he doing up there between “P” and “R”? Trying to get laid, that’s what. Put him next to “U” where he belongs. Cheating Bastard. Does “Q” just think she’s oblivious?! They were meant for each other, so “Q” needs to stick with his commitments. …L, M, N, O, P… R, S, T… Q, U, V… W, X… Y and Z. See? Isn’t that nice?
Also, I’ve contracted the first word made entirely of silent letters:
What’s its definition? A word comprised entirely of silent letters. It’s pronounced how you’d think.
If you wanted to do away with all spelling ambiguity, there’s already a good solution in place that linguists use all the time: the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The problem is of course that regional dialects would cause spelling changes in many words. Depending on how big of a difference there was between your brand of English and the other person’s, you could have some difficulty communicating in writing.
Legacy writing would be a problem too, but not that huge considering that not many of us have read things in their original orthography. For example, spelling was . . . creative in Shakespeare’s time, and like most people he didn’t consistently spell the same word the same way. I can virtually guarantee that no one outside of a college lit major has read Shakespeare without spelling standardization, vocabulary substitution, and/or footnotes to explain things that can’t just be glossed over. Even more recent Colonial-era documents like The Declaration of Independence have been transliterated. In fact, it’s not until the middle of the 19th century that you see the same consistent and standardized spelling that we (mostly) use now. The s–z and ou–u differences between British and American spelling come partly from that late standardization.
The alphabet would be bigger, but spelling would be a breeze since there would be a one-to-one correspondence between the sound and the symbol. Written Italian has close to that correspondence so teaching spelling is hardly even necessary; there’s no such thing as a spelling bee in Italy. Spelling reform in English will probably never happen though.
Like you said, differing accents would be a bit of a problem for the use of phonetic alphabets for everyday writing. For example, should Americans have an alveolar flap letter in their alphabet which the Brits lack, or should Americans just suck it up and memorize which particular flapped sounds are to be written as 't’s and which as 'd’s? Similarly, should some people spell “Mary”, “marry”, and “merry” the same while others spell them differently (and so on for “cot” and “caught”, etc.)? Or should we standardize, and in the process reintroduce spelling difficulties for one camp or another each time?
Not that any of these issues are insurmountable, mind you, and, admittedly, though things would be short of the ostensible perfect towards which they strive, spelling (which is to say, reading and writing) would be a whole lot easier in many ways, quite a laudable goal. Still, when people get misty-eyed about 1-1 correspondence between writing systems and pronunciation (I don’t mean you here; just spelling reform advocates in general), I can’t help but think they’ve been misguided as to the value of such a thing.
Yes, I like the IPA well enough for explaining differences in pronunciation, but writing–an artificial construct of humans–serves a different purpose–that is, simply to communicate ideas beyond regional differences in pronunciation. I don’t see much point in using the IPA to write to someone in England or India. They don’t really care about the American /t/ flap, for example, as I would say it. They just want to know whether I’m talking about a “writer” rather than a “rider”–and whether it be legal rider or of a vehicle rider. Using the IPA wouldn’t clarify that; only context does.
Languages–especially in written form–tend to fix themselves naturally when ambiguity such as this arises. The /k/ vs. the “qu” vs. the “ch” (as in “character”), are a small burden to pay when learning to write, and vary rarely does TRUE (I say “true” because there are some obvious jokes–amusing though they be–where everyone can figure out the true meaning of the writer) confusion arise because of orthography.
You’ve got 26 letters in English. Is that too many for you? Why don’t you try learning Chinese pictographs or Japanese kanji. Then you might be content with the occasional “k” in English.
Interestingly, for purposes of simplicity, tap code omits the letter K in favor of C.
through, rough, bough, cough, dough, bought.
I don’t see why we couldn’t have, say, thirty-six letters in English. Aren’t most of the dialect differences in the vowels? We could split the consonants out so that thet all have their own sounds, and let the vowels vary. Though the glottal stop and alveolar flap (thanks, Indistinguishable!) situations may be a problem.
That sounds good to me. Go ahead ahead and try it. Your work is cut out for you. You have at least the whole of North America and the British “Empire” to deal with.
We already have over 20 vowels (depending on whether you consider r-coloring and l-coloring as distinct vowels.) Your number of 36 would expand to over 50, I’d imagine.
It might make literacy more attainable, but I doubt it. I think we’re stuck with what we have.
Imagine: you want your child to read Cinderella. Using 36 sylmbols (rather than 26), is he or she going to get much more out of it?
The main reason it won’t make literacy more attainable, of course, is because nothing is written that way. Unfortunate, perhaps, but what are you gonna do? If you want to change such an immensely popular writing system, you have to do it gradually.
Damnit.
Strikes the letter “K” off the list of Things Which Mark Twain Hasn’t Written About"
I’m down to a single sheet of paper now.
Chinese doesn’t have pictographs. I don’t think any modern written language uses pictographs.
No K? Somehow “O-ay” just doesn’t sound right.
Isn’t it useful in helping to determine the origin of a word? I’d say keep it, because it’s part of our cultural identity.
edit: Also, isn’t it useful in places were a C would have had a soft sound, like “fake”?
If anyone is seriously interested in the history of our alphabet, and why we have the particular letters we do, and how they came to be in the order they are, I can recommend this book: Language Visible by David Sacks.
Among many other things, it talks about something that has been already mentioned in this thread: The ancester of our letter “C” was originally a “G” sound, so the ancester of our “K” was not a redundant letter.
Ed
Well, then, please insert the appropriate term while I wash my socks. Thank you.