>>>>To Travis:
>>Yes, but is mere simplification all that you want here? Just because something is "simple" does not mean that it is sIstematic.<<
Now I think mere simplification will be "feasible", because sistematic proposals did not succeed in the past. As far as English is concerened, sistematic orthography could totally change the appearance of the entire language visually, which is not so desirable for peeple all over the world. Why should we re-lern how to spell "or", "that", "because", and "form"? Your orthography would require lerning a lot because of sistem consistency.<<
Well, yes, it would initially require a lot of learning, simply because it is designed for consistency and accuracy, within the limits of the dialects for which it was designed, not for necessarily holding a close resemblance to the current orthography (even though it actually does hold a closer resemblance to it than many other similar proposals). At the same time, it does actually contain a lot of compromises for the sake of practicality. In particular, it is designed to still be easily typable, by using no extra letters and very few diacritics in normal usage (the only normal diacritic being the diaeresis, which is very infrequent in practice in it), and it normally omits the marking of primary and second stress. However, it does technically allow for the marking of primary and second stress, with the acute (circumflex if already diaeresised) and grave diacritics respectively on the symbols marking the vowels in question, if one does have a need, such as in dictionaries or like, to actually mark stress that is not reflected in changes in vowel phonemes themselves.
>>>>The matter is that simply rationalizing spellings individually result in something that is truly rational, where one can convert how something is spelled directly into phonemes in what form of the language that the orthography was designed for.<<
That depends on how you define "to rationalize". Your own proposed orthography is drastic and consistent, so I think we would need a special dictionary for reading and writing it. Ordinary dictionarys do not serve when it comes to rationalized spellings. I would try to be practical. I would compromise a lot. Maybe, we might need a list of respellings.<<
The main thing is that I don't see a whole lot of use in trying to patch up the current system, and if something based closely on the current system were to be adopted, I don't think it would in itself provide enough benefit to be worth the costs of updating. And yes, it would require wholly new dictionaries just to begin with, as well as effectively completely new orthographic practices, for an English-language context, as those which correspond to an orthography that attempts to at least closely approximate actual phonemes do not exist in English-language orthographic traditions today, which are based on fixed spellings with no necessary correlation to pronunciation with small amounts of free variation largely determined by what literary standards one is using.
That aside, the biggest issue here is not the rationalization of spelling itself, but rather what phonemes to use, or even just what the phonemes to represent are in the first place. For example, in my writing above, I represented effectively the phonology of a mixture of conservative GAE, my own dialect, and NAE dialects, in particular conservative northeastern US ones, which lack certain mergers which are present in both conservative GAE and my own dialect. However, such would not necessarily serve all of English well in practice; it would be probably best to redact out more local dialect features of mine and include extra distinctions which are present in much of English outside NAE but which are rather lacking in many NAE dialects and are of the sort that NAE-speakers without said distinctions could easily guess what the distinction-less pronunciations would be; for example, most NAE-speakers could get that they actually pronounce what might be spelled as <d'ju>/<dju> or <st'jupid>/<stjupid> as if it were spelled as just <du> or <stupid> respectively.
>>>>Of course, what these phonemes are is another matter unto itself, and choosing or designing which speech form the orthography will represent is most definiTly a nontrivial task in the very least.<<
Judging from "rizzoalt" and "derrektli", you chose your own speech sound, didn't you? I would choose what many dictionarys recommend as standard pronunciation. What the standard pronunciation is must be difficult, but I think it is suposed to be a model pronunciation for lerners.<<
It is partly based on my own speech, and yes, many of the vowels do most definitely reflect my own pronunciation, in particular it heavily merges vowels before /r/ and reflects reduction of vowels to [I] or [1]. However, I have tried to represent certain phoneme distinctions that I don't have natively but which I can relatively accurately guess, such as /A/ versus /Q/, /V/ versus /@/, and /W/ versus /w/. Furthermore, the orthography intentionally masks much of the phonology of my own dialect, besides certain things like vowel reduction patterns and like, and is closer to formal or semi-formal speech than everyday speech here. And yes, the spellings of current "result" and "directly" which you are most likely thinking of are <rizzult> and <dairektli>, but I wasn't quite sure about these, so hence I just ended up opting to use my own speech forms, even though in retrospect I might have used them.
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