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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

That's a really bad benefit. If it's worth distinguishing them, it's worth distinguishing them when pronounced. Change the pronunciation or write them the same.

It's not like English avoids words that have very separate meanings spelled and pronounced the same way.

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> If it's worth distinguishing them, it's worth distinguishing them when pronounced. Change the pronunciation or write them the same.

Except you can't do that. You're working on distributed legacy protocol, not some thing that you can successfully force roll-out arbitrary changes.

I think you'd have less success with your proposal than getting everyone to finally migrate to IPv6.

That's a valid stance, but if you want to take that attitude then reply to the person that suggested spelling reform in the first place, not me.

I don't think he was suggesting that.

The person who brought it up, if you want to be picky.

My original comment is in the context of spelling reform.

Anecdotal, but I feel like I tend to do subconsciously alter my diction a bit when the word is ambiguous from the context. I may use a slightly different voice inflection or stress or pacing to help disambiguate.

Think of someone lingering on a punned word to emphasize the joke, for example.

Why unnecessarily hobble readers that have already learned the homophone sets by heart ?

If you're doing spelling reform, you have already decided it's worth hobbling what people have already learned in exchange for fixing things.

It is not more unnecessary than any other part of the spelling reform.

Spelling reform is a continuum from do-nothing to full-phonetic. There's plenty of grey.

Consider tho that if English is nowadays a lingua franca, we submit its learners to a lot of mental torture, including vast amounts of rote memorization of both spelling and pronunciation. English may not be quite as obnoxious as its up-and-coming main competitor, Mandarin Chinese, but it's a difference of degree not of kind. My 0,02€; YMMV.

Start with common words that are one-offs that are assertively misleadingly spelled. Lose, gross, broad, height. There are many more.

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