Since there isn't much support for simplifying English spelling, how 'bout change the way English is

[raccoon]

pronounced?


For example:

knife (pronounce Kah-nife)

night (pronounce nishhht)

bough All pronounced alike; either rhymes with "how" or with "fluff."
tough
rough

What do you think?

[miss_american_pie]

1. The dumbing down of language?

Not my cup of tea.

:hi:

[raccoon]

5. I don't see it as dumbing down; have trouble understanding why you would.

Anyway, this is just :silly: anyway; I know it would never fly.

[Orsino]

2. English pronunciation is constantly changing.

Always has been. But it's still absorbing too much new vocabulary for us to expect simplification anytime soon.

[HopeHoops]

3. I used to live near an elementary school with confusing signs.

On one side, here was a sign that said "SLOW".

For reasons beyond my comprehension, coming from the other direction the sign said "SLO"

WTF is the rationale for that? Half of the kids walking to school are going to spell "SLOW" wrong!

I almost took a permanent marker to it.

[Gormy Cuss]

4. In many cases the way we spell the word is related to the etymology.

Understanding the roots of the word is a richer experience of language. We coud rite evrithing baised on phonics but that woud increes the number of homophones and diminish clarity.

[woo me with science]

7. Yep. Look at the kidlets in the National Spelling Bee.

"What is the origin of the word, please?"
.
.
.
.
.
.

[woo me with science]

6. Just work on your spelling. nt

[raccoon]

9. No problema with that, but it irks me that English spelling is so dumbass when

Spanish spelling makes everything so much EASIER!

[struggle4progress]

8. i sa: scru it! u yu haf tu hav tha curridg uv yur convikshins

[no name no slogan]

10. Bad idea.

Most people recognize written words by their shape, not just their spelling.

Fro exmaple, yuo cna still raed thsi sentecne easily, althuogh it has amny misspelled words, because you see the shapes of the words, not just the letters.

Changing the spelling to a phonetic system would effectively render most people illiterate and cause more headaches than you can imagine.

[Bucky]

11. I once wrote a story that took place in a US where simplified spelling caught on.

So I tried to write it along the lines of Noah Webster's suggested spelling. I quickly realized what a total quagmire more phonetic spelling is. Thru for through and strait for straight are easy; enuf for enough seemed kinda comic bookish; Linkhern for Lincoln was a tough judgment call, based on some conjectures of 19th century pronunciations. But I had to simply eliminate the word "throughout" from the story. It's a word you simply can't simplify without rendering it unreadable.