
The Great Failure of Andrew Carnegie's Simplified Spelling Lobby - shortformblog
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-great-failure-of-andrew-carnegies-simplified-spelling-lobby
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alricb
Some of Carnegie's reformed words were a bit silly in that they didn't account
for the systematic assimilation of the voicing of the consonant preceding /d/
in words ending in -ed.

So in the 30 words you get "askt", "fixt" and "shipt", but the phonology of
English makes the d -> t transition automatic, since k, x and p are unvoiced;
they are therefore followed by the unvoiced /t/, systematically.

By using "t" there, they actually complicated spelling, since they break the
"just add -ed" rule for the past participle.

I think they might have done better by de-Frenchifying English, by removing
supernumerary letters in words like "programme" (which they suggested, and
which is actually common these days) and maybe get rid of vestigial greek
spelling like they did in Spanish (like telefone, which they suggested):
filip, filosofy, sycology...

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imglorp
This audience might be interested in another spelling reformer, George Bernard
Shaw, who funded a phonetic writing system with a non-latin character set
called Shavian. A more practical revision of Shavian was Quikscript. A print
book was published in Shavian (I have a copy :-) and there are fonts available
for both systems.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript)

