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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Except we did a spelling reform.

That’s amazing. Do you remember what went into the reform, whether you had to convince many people, and your personal feelings at the time?

That happened in the 1800s and very early 1900s. US dictionary makers favored phonetic reform. -IZE has been standard since the 1920s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

The difficulty with phonetic spelling reforms is that you quickly run into the problem of words being pronounced markedly different in different dialects in different regions, and you inevitably end up trying to declare on dialect standard and the rest wrong. Granted, the sort of people into this reform are usually happy to declare their dialect obviously correct and demand everyone else get in line.

The last time this came up on HN, the comment thread already disagreed on whether "mention" should be spelled "menchin", "menshin", "menchun", or "menshun".

A spelling reform could keep “mention” and still significantly improve the orthography were it to simply apply the rules more consistently. And when words are genuinely different, like “ask” or “of” it's not going to hurt to spell them differently.

a spelling reform cud[] keep “mention” and still significantly improov the orthography wer it to simply aply the rules more consistently. And when wurds ar genuinely different, like “ask/aask” or “uv/ov” it's not going to hurt to spell them differently.

[] although how to spell put/putt is an open question. here I have sided with northerners and decided to spell them the same.

... are you suggesting that every English dialect spell its words differently, so that we no longer have a written common language? That Americans spell "were" "wur" and Brits spell it "wuh", so that when I read a sentence written in a book I have to know or puzzle out the accent of the person who wrote it?

[As an aside, why did you drop the doubled "p" from "apply" but not the doubled "f" from "different" or the doubled "l" from "spell"?]

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