Recently, I saw this Fixing the Alphabet video, which reminded me of an older and more comprehensive Why The English Alphabet Is Stupid video. I mostly agree with the first one, completely with the other one and I want to take it a step further here. But first I will answer the important question of “Why bother?”.
The biggest benefit is lessening the difference between spoken and written English, which has such oddities as words which are written the same but spoken differently (like “read” and its past forms) or words which sound the same but are written differently. Fixing these inconsistencies would mean less exceptions to remember, easier usage and learning of the language and no more spelling competitions. And because the speaking part is the same and no words are lost, I don’t think the language would loose anything important in the process.
The rest of the text relies on you having similar pronunciation of words as me, so you may not hear the sounds I write about here or hear something different instead, but I hope the text will be understandable enough anyway.
In both videos they correctly spotted the tendency of C to masquerade as K and S. However, there is more to C than that. Combined with H it does a unique sound, like in the word “check”. Also, if you look into other languages, you can find that C itself has a unique sound there, which sounds like the combination TS (for example the tsetse fly, you can hear it in the second “tse”). So I say we have two options here:
I think that the second option will be easier to get used to.
The letter W just makes a V sound. Take words like “worry” and “very”, the first letter sounds the same. I don’t see anything useful that W could do, so I can’t say anything other than just stop using it.
The letters F, Q and X all make a sound that can be reproduced with a combination of other letters. For F it is PH like in the word “fan”, for Q it is KV like in the word “quick”, and for the X it is KS like in the word “box”. So, three options:
The third option should work fine I think, as long as we keep saying them the same – X should not be copying Z and so on.
Just a quick note about J. Its unique sound can be heard in “juice”. However, sometimes G likes to copy J, like in the name “George”, despite it having its own sound like in the word “gamble”. So tell G to mind its own business and use J where you hear it.
Just why? If you don’t hear it, don’t write it.
But apart from the obvious examples, like K in “knee”, take a look at the word “letter”. Now, how many times do you say T when you say that word? You say it only once, the other T is practically silent (and the second E too for that matter).
Here we get into a real mess. The vowels are A E I O U Y and are pronounced differently based on what word we are saying. Like when you say “keg” and then you say “can”, the A sounds very similar to the E. So what is the actual unique sound each letter makes? I think they are these:
I propose to use the vowels only in cases which match this one unique sound they make, except for Y which would be used only as a consonant.
Another thing about vowels is that sometimes we make their sound for longer than other times. Like when you say “lid”, the I is quite short, but when you say “read”, the I you hear in it goes on for longer. I can’t provide a consistent replacement rule for this, so you just need to take a guess and double up the vowel where it seems appropriate - “read” becomes “riid”.
So, to sum up the changes.
It is quite a lot to take in, but it covers most if not all of the problems in English writing. You may not like all the proposed changes, but I think most people would be fine with the obvious fixes regarding C or W.
Lux horibl dasnt it? Es vif evrifin nyuu, it riqayrs sam taym getin yuusd tu.
Lisn ap dou. If yuu layk eni of diis chenjis, yuu ken meyk dem hapn. Ool d lingvists and piipl layk dem onli stadi d lengvij, dey dont meynteyn it. Sou, ool yuu niid tu du is tu staart vraytin difrntli, konvins sam piipl dat it is betr den d noorml vey sou dey spred it and ivenchuli d tiichrs vil jast shrag, sey “Lengvij is oolveyz ivolvin.” and staart tiichin dis in skuuls es d gramatikli korekt Inglish.