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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

jonathankoren is correct that Q serves no purpose in English. He's also correct about it only appearing in the cluster /kw/, as long as you recognize that "Iraq", "waqf", "qoppa", etc. are not actually English words. But even in those cases, Q and K are exactly equivalent in written English, because we don't have the uvular consonants present in Arabic. In a reformed spelling, Q would have no place, just as it has no logical place in the other languages that have or could have inherited it from Latin.

The standard way to represent /tʃ/ in one letter is "č".

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"A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling"

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.

The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

That's just a fancy c. Diacritics are for cowards that are too scared to make a new letter for a sound that doesn't have a single letter.

As J is just a fancy I, and W is a fancy V. It's a pretty standard way to develop new letters. G is literally a fancy C.

Incidentally, there's a reason the IPA for the sound is /tʃ/. It's two sounds pronounced together, in a manner essentially identical to the /kt/ at the end of the word "act", or the /ts/ at the end of the word "cats".

The parallel is not perfect - in particular, affricates are generally understood as being a single sound, while coarticulated stops are generally thought of as being two sounds in sequence, even where they show all the phonological independence you'd expect of a single phoneme. (Compare e.g. Greek "Ctesias".)

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