[Development] OT: English phonetic spelling (was: QList)

[Matthew Woehlke]

On 2017-03-27 03:43, Marc Mutz wrote:
> And "debt" should be spelled "det". It should. It isn't. You can start writing 
> det everywhere now, and maybe in a generation you will have collected enough 
> mindshare that the Oxford Dictionary contains it as an alternative spelling. 
> Your grandchildren will thank you for a simplified language, but your children 
> will fight with the fact that debt is now called det.

Yeah, that just looks wrong. If we were to ever do such things, I would
much rather switch wholesale to a completely phonetic spelling of
everything :-).

Just for fun...

Iä, thät güst lûks wråŋ. Yf wi wÿr tu ëvÿr du süch thyŋz, ai wûd müch
räthÿr swytch holsel tu ü kümplitli fünëtyk spëlyŋ üf ëvrithyŋ. Ai häpyn
tu lüik thys systûm wych ai ëm dëmünstretyŋ hir ;-).

(Yeah... I've given this "some" thought before now :-)... writing takes
practice, but *reading* is surprisingly easy... at least if you can
pronounce latin-derived langauges. There are 12 distinct vowel
characters and 22 distinct consonant characters, but - with one
exception - each has a single, distinct pronunciation. The exception is
'h', which may appear by itself, or as the second character of 5
two-character consonants.)

> Been there, done that. Delphin is now spelled Delfin in German. For - what - 
> 20 years now? It still looks wrong. Oh, and the public outcry back then. And 
> the economic damage caused by having to re-proofread, re-edit and re-print a 
> ton of Flipper books...

...and, correct me if I'm wrong, but German is generally spelled how it
is pronounced, yes?

-- 
Matthew