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Indeed, but there's not just US and UK. In northern Ireland house is sometimes pronounced "hoyse" (rhymes with choice). Time is "toyme" in Australian. Pen is "pin" in New Zealand. Etc.

Speaking of which, it seems that the only case of spelling adapting to pronunciation in English is the commonly used spelling "me" for "my" in Irish dialects.



I wonder if it's possible to come up with an alphabet where different sound clusters are addressed by individual letters. For instance:

'h𐑬se' and 'aut' - where 𐑬 is read as 'au' in RP, but as 'oy' in NI.

The downside is that the said alphabet would have more letters and it won't be always easy to guess the spelling based on pronunciation (still easier than currently in English), but the upside is that one can always read any word correctly in their accent.


you see that to an extent with the use diacritics in some languages. for example "ch" or "cz" in czech is written as č.

here is an interesting article listing digraphs in various languages with latin script that have lots of examples where the same sounds have a single letter in other languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_digraphs


> Pen is "pin" in New Zealand.

I really want to hear a New Zealander quote "The pen is mightier than the sword".




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