But English is so broken, from what I see there are consts for spelling where you could create a language with clear rules and no freaking exceptions based on the history of the word. Maybe if you could reform/refactor English to drop the historical stuff and write words exactly how they sound - we would rename this language to not cause confusion or outrage, like a clean refactor.
When you consider that words are essentially the same thing as sinograms (chinese characters), the spelling is not a big deal.
English spelling needs to remain the same because they are primarily visual. Native level English users just scan the general shapes of words and know the meanings in the same way that Chinese users just scan the general gists of the characters.
The nice result is that you can have 10 wildly different English accents / dialects that all use the same spelling. It keeps everyone bound together.
After all, if you went with phonetic spelling, which accent would you choose?
The comparison is generous to Chinese characters. Even the world's worst speller, confronted with an uncommon English word, could make a guess at the spelling that's probably decipherable. If you forget a Chinese character you may not even be able to put the first stroke to paper.
Yes, of course. But that was not the point I was making. Personally I find alphabets to be superior for that reason. But to be fair, I also don't know Chinese!
There's an unbelievable amount of woo and magical thinking floating around this subject. It definitely requires more effort to learn and remember. But yes, point taken.
Forget dialects, why is it possible in English that words sound different while being spelled the same way? Pronunciation is completely unpredictable, you have to know (guess) the etymology of every loanword and remember which of them have the original pronunciation and which of them the butchered one.
In the Early Modern period, "scythe" was actually spelled "sithe". The spelling changed to resemble a (false) classical etymology.[1] A similar thing happened to the words "island", "ache" and "tongue", which were originally spelled "iland", "ake" and "tung".
See also "some" (originally "sum"), "friend" (originally "frend"), "delight" (originally "delite") and "could" (originally "coude").
There isn't one. English is not imposed by an authority, it is pulled and pushed from all directions by schools, corporations, governments, history, fashion, misunderstanding, other languages, bloody mindedness, and more.
The one used on national UK TV for example and as I said it would be a fork, you don't want to force people to change, though something like Esperanto would cause less outrage then forking english it seems.
OK, I give up on my idea, hopefully some linguists would popup in here and link some articles that would explore the topic. I think it would be interesting to plug some rules into an algorithm and have it search for the optimal language. We would not force it as a main language but a secondary one, like when you make a movie or book you provide a translation in this language too on top of the other popular languages you support. Since is a simple and perfectly defined language from it you could auto-generate translation to less popular languages.
