> The lack of correlation between sound and letter is embarrassing.
Well, it's worse than that, because English speakers don't agree on how words sound.
So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place ... but not for all instances of those vowel sounds in all words. Some people like to add r's that aren't there, but there's a few places to do it.
You'd need a much tighter language community to enforce consistent enough pronunciation that a phonetic alphabet would work. And you'd be giving up centuries of printed works to do it.
I think of English as being actually not a single language but rather dialects with many different pronunciations which share most of their written form. I also think this means any centralised effort to change how it is written will fall flat.
We can’t agree in my house how to pronounce “bath” so how will the entire English speaking world agree on the spelling of every such word with consistent meaning but differing pronunciation…
Been thinking about this and Finnish dialects can be misspelled mostly inside standard writing system. I see no reason why words should not have multiple spellings matching to different pronunciations. It is kinda a thing already when different local words are used. So why not go entire way. Write how it is pronounced even if someone uses different pronounciation.
> So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place
Which is how the language functioned before the printing press.
Well, it's worse than that, because English speakers don't agree on how words sound.
So, if we started spelling things like they sound, words would get misspelled (or perhaps misspelt) a lot more than now. There's a lot of vowel shifts from place to place ... but not for all instances of those vowel sounds in all words. Some people like to add r's that aren't there, but there's a few places to do it.
You'd need a much tighter language community to enforce consistent enough pronunciation that a phonetic alphabet would work. And you'd be giving up centuries of printed works to do it.