we could also spell ch as tsh. there's no reason to do any of this except i think it would look sorta interesting and different. words like:
- dzhudzh (judge)
- tshurtsh (church)
- tshandzhe (change)
one of the historical material realities i aesthetically bemoan the most is english orthography never keeping any diacritics even though we have an embarrassment of riches phonetically regarding vowel sounds in particular.
of course this butts up against the other reality of english having no particular dominant phonetic set for the past two centuries—and especially not before that but in a different way during the middle english period—and even less during the old english period hoo boy—what with its particular means of globalization and use as lingua franca in the context of england's particular ideological brainworms—i wonder if we had more specific letters for specific vowels (say, of the london dialect juuuust on the eve of the great vowel shift), how different the language could sound now.
in the past i've foolishly tried to come up with a full phonetic transcription system for English but it's literally impossible with all the splits and mergers across all the different dialects
the best i ever managed was one that works pretty well for my dialect of california english, which had six unique vowel letters, each with two lengths. "y" is used for schwa, which is inspired by the orthography of Welsh
- a /æ/ [or /a/ in diphthongs]
- ā /ɑ/
- e /ɛ/
- ē /eɪ/
- i /ɪ/
- ī /i/
- o /ɔ/
- ō /oʊ/
- u /ʊ/
- ū /u/
- y /ə/
- ȳ /ʌ/
i love how i just have one extra vowel than the other half of GA-speaking americans. are you sad that [ɔ] was taken from you if you don't have it? i would be.
e: literally in the most fanciful inane way of like, 'ha! my mouth gets to go somewhere yours doesnt. thats so sad for you...'
other than that it doesn't actually ambiguously merge that many words
but yes that's one of the many reasons my system doesn't work outside of the specific subset of General American with the cot-caught merger
it also can't handle the father/bother merger and it doesn't deal with the /ɜː/ sound, or with the Australian bad-lad split, or with the lot and cloth set of words in Received Pronunciation
has anyone ever attempted a non-phonetic (or maybe phonetics-final) "spelling reform" of english? like, aim for other stuff first. just clean up the digraphs a lil around the edges, maybe sneak a ƿ back in there, just for a treat...
i realize this partially literally happened a lot in the 16th century but yknow what. it was fun that you thought Thames had a greek root so it has an h there now. do it again. keep doing it.
so you can rewrite things like the following:
- light -> lite
- laugh -> laff
- rough -> ruff
- though -> tho
- thought -> thot
- sigh -> sie
Some sounds can be assigned different letter sequences depending on their placement within the syllable. To keep things relatively consistent with current spelling, you can do the following:
- ch at the start of a syllable and tch at the end
- j at the start of a syllable and dge at the end
- c before
a, o, uand k beforee, iand ck at the end
If a vowel is at the end of a word, or if it's followed by a silent e without an intervening doubled consonant written in between, then it represents the "long" value of that vowel, as seen in the letter names for A E I O U.
If a vowel is followed by a consonant, with nothing following, then it represents the "short value". The same is true for vowels with a silent e but with a doubled consonant written in between, and for verbs ending in -ing.
- fight -> fite
- fighting -> fiting
- fit -> fit
- fitting -> fitting
