Re: Advanced English to become official!

Christian Thalmann <cinga@...> wrote:
> PS: The most realistic English spelling reform (and I do
>     agree that one is due) that I've heard proposed so
>     far is to assign exactly one (the most common)
>     pronunciation to each English grapheme, and
>     regularize only those words which deviate.  For
>     example, |ea| would stand for [i:], so beard, hear,
>     mean, read etc would all retain their spelling, but
>     heart and head would become hart and hed.  This way,
>     English would still feel like English to the native
>     speakers, and the reform would be much more likely
>     to be accepted.
>
>     Is there a website with an explicit "master plan"
>     for this concept?  If not, I'd be tempted to write up
>     such a plan.  Maybe with the help of a dedicated
>     Yahoo!Group?
I actually did start doing this once, when I was a computer lab assistant
with lots of free time... I don't know if I still have all my data, but I
started going through all the monosyllables in my dictionary and noting down
all the patterns and the characteristic pronunciations.  I'm not sure how
far I got; I'm sure I remember it wasn't very far (maybe through a few
vowel phonemes; consonants are easy).

The hard part is making "new" spellings look natural.  There doesn't appear
to be any way to regularize the spelling of "have" and making it still look
English.


	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/