I use a screen reader and in managed quite well until 1200.
That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language with an alphabet.
Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe. Most words in written English resemble words in Germanic or Romance languages. If English was spelled phonetically, the resemblance would be significantly smaller.
People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes perfect sense. It’s the English pronunciation which is really strange and inconsistent.
> Phonetic spelling would perhaps make the language easier to learn for native speakers, but it would make it harder to learn for foreigners, at least those of us who come from Europe.
BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone. In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade. It's _that_ easy because both alphabets are phonetic (although it's only one-way in case of Russian).
Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize. It was not at all helpful. I also ended up learning English as a mostly written language, so after moving to the US, I kept getting surprised by how familiar written words are actually pronounced.
E.g. it took me a while to explain to a nurse over the phone that I may have pneumonia and need an appointment. Why the heck that leading "p" is completely silent?!?
> In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade.
In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade. If your parents didn't teach you before that, like mine did.
> Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize.
There are rules though, that we're ad-hoc taught as kids, or just absorb through exposure. Just because there's a lot of exceptions doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's an attempt at listing them out: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
To be technical: the term is phonemic, not phonetic. If we spelled phonetically, we'd have different symbols for the p in 'spin' and the p+h in 'pin'. Similarly for 'tick' and 'stick', and 'scale' and 'kale'. Native English speakers generally don't notice the differences, just like speakers of many oriental languages don't easily recognize the difference between English /l/ and /r/.
It depends on a writer, but it can be very legible.
I used to be able to jot down notes during lectures almost as fast as the normal spoken speed. We often traded notebooks when preparing for the exams, and I rarely had problems reading other people's notes.
It's also really nice to write, once you learn it. I was surprised after moving to the US that almost nobody here knows how to write in cursive anymore.
The usual pictures of и / п / т / ш ambiguity that you see are exaggerated in that they show forms that are nominally “standard” but basically impossible to reproduce without a fountain (or, even better, dip) pen (think round hand or, as 'cyberax mentions, Spencerian script), yet use a constant stroke width that such an implement wouldn’t produce. For the latter two, people who actually write m and not т will often resolve the ambiguity with ш with an over- resp. underbar (the same ones that Serbian uses even in print[1]). It’s also pretty normal to exaggerate letter joins when they come out looking too similar to parts of other letters, etc. Overall, modern Russian cursive is about as legible as the modern French one, and I don’t think people complain much about the latter.
I also find the hand-wringing about English accents somewhat surprising. Yes, different accents exist, and yes, English has a much wider variation than (urban) Russian (there are things in the countryside that urban dwellers haven’t heard for a century), but phonemic orthographies are a thing, and though children in e.g. Moscow may perpetually struggle with orthographic distinctions that no longer correspond to anything in their accent, the idea of a spelling competition remains about as laughable as that of a shoelace-tying one. Nobody makes you represent the many mergers of English with a single letter in your new orthography (though it would be funny).
You suffer from the typical brain damage caused by using a language without an alphabet.
There is no such thing as spelling in phonetic writing systems because they render what is said, not some random collection of glyphs that approximated how a word was pronounced 500 years ago, in the best case.
If two people with different accents can speak to each other, they can also write to each other under a phonetic writing system.
That's kind of a mean and not very relevant response.
The point is that if anyone wanted to reform English spelling, they would have to choose a particular dialect to standardize around.
There is no standard English dialect. There is a relatively standard version of American English ("Walter Cronkite English"), and there is Received Pronunciation in England, but then there are all sorts of other dialects that are dominant elsewhere (Scotland, Ireland, India, etc.).
Which one should we choose to base our orthography on? Or should we allow English spelling to splinter into several completely different systems? Yes, there are already slight differences in British vs. American spelling, but they're extremely minor compared to the differences in pronunciation.
And after this spelling reform, will people still be able to read anything written before the reform, or will that become a specialized ability that most people don't learn?
Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.
You're proposing to make reading just as difficult as understanding every other dialect of spoken English - something even most native speakers have difficulty with.
Your proposal would also eliminate whole-word recognition, which is what makes reading fast. It would slow us all down to the speed of young children just learning to sound out the letters.
Right. Because everyone gets confused when you write behavior instead of behaviour or license/licence or analyze/analyse. It’s so confusing that there are already different ways to spell the same thing.
American English isn’t the only spelling of English.
There are exactly two ways to write license. What you're proposing is that there should be 20 different ways to write it, depending on what particular dialect of English you speak.
We don't really manage it with speaking. I don't understand highland Scottish dialects at all. I have trouble understanding Cockney.
Yet people who speak those dialects can write anything down and I'll understand it perfectly with no effort.
You don't understand the value of standardization. It's what makes reading fast and independent of dialect. People who read English don't literally sound out the letters. They recognize the whole word instantly. Sounding out the letters is only a fallback mechanism.
What you're proposing might work for a tiny language with only one main dialect. English is a global language with a huge number of dialects. Major languages like this need standardized writing systems, and to no one's surprise, they all have them.
This is the argument that Chinese use for keeping their characters. It's ultimate expression is defending electric motor to be written as "lighting clouds power tree table" because if we didn't then it would be anarchy.
English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
That someone in a two sheep village in Scotland might have trouble reading War and Peace isn't a reason to abuse every child for a decade before they too develop the same brain damage as the adults who abused them.
The Chinese have many good arguments for keeping their characters, which go far beyond mutual intelligibility.
But you don't have to go all the way to "English should switch to hieroglyphs" to see that keeping a uniform but imperfect phonetic system is far superior to having everyone write their own partially intelligible dialect however they want.
> English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
I assume you mean going East from Vancouver, because there are practically no major population centers practically in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
But no, the dialects spoken in the major English-speaking population centers are not mutually intelligible. An American exposed to Cockney, a major English dialect, for the first time will have no idea that is being said.
Here's the future you want:
"Ai fink va braan kye-ao iz ow-va ve-ya bai va waw-ʔuh."
How many Americans do you think will understand that at first sight?
Then under your definition there must not be any widely used written language with an alphabet. Most of the world's alphabetic writing systems aren't phonetic transcriptions, they're standardized. They're usually based on the prestige dialect, at the cost of diminutizing other dialects.
For example, Spanish has a fairly consistent spelling system standardized by RAE, based in Madrid. But, for instance, even though much of Latin America doesn't have a distinction between s and soft c (seseo), they still keep the distinction in its spelling.
One I can say for sure is Serbian. Italian looks like it does. Finnish, Hungarian, Georgian, Armenian, Albanian, Turkish and Korean are all ones I've heard are to a lesser or greater degree, but I don't know enough to say either way.
Standard Italian speakers in Rome struggle to understand Ciociaro dialect, which is from the region on the outskirts of Rome. Take "n'coppa" - spelled with a "c" but very much pronounced /ŋgopa/ with a voiced [g]. I dont even have a reference point for Sicilian but that really pushes the bounds of the dialect/language distinction.
That's one example, from a language with ~70M native speakers, in a geographically tight region.
Likewise, all your other languages (sans Turkiye) are very compact geographically with small speaker bases. And Turkish undoubtedly has large aspects of forced standardization and dialect extinction.
English is spoken by 1.5 billion, by ESL speakers from basically every language tree, across the world. Try to get folks from Boston, Brooklyn, Philly, and Albany in a room and get them to agree on a phonetic spelling.
People always overestimate how 'phonetic' their language is, because nobody actually uses phonemes in regular speech. In Korean in particular, there doesn't even seem to be any obvious correspondence between what is written, and what is actually said.
Foreign accents don't come from any inherent inability to learn language after X years of age. They come from people pronouncing languages as they are written, and virtually no language is like that in reality.
It's true that when studying a foreign language, learning to read too early can harm your pronunciation. However, it is very difficult to learn new sounds that have no equivalent in your native language, and some languages have very restrictive phonology (like Italian and Japanese requiring a vowel at the end of every word) that their native speakers struggle to break out of.
> Around 1809, ... Sequoyah began work to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. ... He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he originally created.
> After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society.[4] By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography. ...
> Albert Gallatin ... believed [the syllabary] was superior to the English alphabet in that literacy could be easily achieved for Cherokee at a time when only one-third of English-speaking people achieved the same goal.[6] He recognized that even though the Cherokee student must learn 85 characters instead of 26 for English, the Cherokee could read immediately after learning all the symbols. The Cherokee student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing might require two years to achieve.
I've been thinking about this problem for quite awhile, and recently coded up something that allows for easy conversion between today's written English, and a phonetic spelling convention.
I think he means the latter. This makes learning the spelling harder because you have to learn each word individually, as you would have with hieroglyphs, as opposed spelling it out based on phonemes (that you would have learned from learning how words sound when spoken) and a limited alphabet.
That's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s. "Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are spelled as they sound.
That's why kids start with "Run Spot Run" and other simple 3 and 4 letter words. They then learn the more complicated rules and exceptions as they go. It's really not a problem.
Spelling can still be phonetic even if groups of letters have differing sounds from those letters' sounds serially in isolation. The key criterion is that the rules must be universal, applying to every instance of those groupings, rather than having exceptions for their appearances in certain words.
...ok, it occurs to me now that a smart-alec might declare each individual word to be a "grouping of letters with its own phonetic pronounciation", whereupon phoneticism as-defined is achieved trivially because pronounciation is universal over the singleton universe of words spelt exactly like that word. You know what I _mean_ - "sufficiently small groups of letters", hand-wave.
The issue is that the language can never render that collection of letters. Sh in English can render the sh in sheep. It can't render any word with the sounds s and h together.
An alphabet assigns a letter to a sound. No more no less. English no longer has an alphabet because the Latin alphabet, designed for Latin languages, replaced the native Runic alphabet.
Serbian has an alphabet, as does Italian. All other European languages I'm aware of don't.
That said: phonetic spelling now. We have spent 500 years turning English into something closer to Egyptian hieroglyphs than a language with an alphabet.