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You can change the spelling of one word in the English language to match how they are pronounced. What word do you pick? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 years ago by ericbomb@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I'm picking "Colonel" needs to be respelled to match how it's pronounced.

Try to pick a word no one else has picked. What word are you respelling?

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[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 25 points 2 years ago (3 children)

English orthography is awful. Hard "c" AND soft "c"? Are you crazy? How about that "k" that is already the hard c sound? It should be "kat" and "kar". And it only goes downhill from there (or their?!?).

We should clean it up someday. But we'll probably end up with LOL-WTF-speak.

[–] room_raccoon@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

It's not all bad. The varied spellings of English help with visual pattern recognition and increased reading speed.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

That must have already happened and we got the Geordie accent from it!

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago

Some of the low hanging fruit would just be to pick one pronunciation of "oo" and stick with it:

book
blood
floor
brooch
boot

The problem is that English has far more vowel sounds than vowels. And that's without even having certain sounds that are common in other languages like "ü".