"A Modest Proposal" (No, not that one)

Q

Could adding new letters to the English alphabet ever solve its spelling inconsistencies, or is it just too complicated?
https://www.quora.com/Could-adding-new-letters-to-the-English-alphabet-ever-solve-its-spelling-inconsistencies-or-is-it-just-too-complicated/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-1

Hans-Georg Lundahl

amateur linguist

5.VII.2025

Either new letters or new letter combinations and reuse of the ones already there would solve the inconsistencies.

However, the result would be a very drastic change in spelling, comparable to the one between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English.

That means, the first generation which could only use the new spelling would be incapable of reading texts from when the older (current) spelling was (is) the only one. They would need to learn it nearly like learning a foreign language, or, if not, forego a Fantastic Four from 1970 or a novel by Chesterton from 1914, unless it had been transscribed into the new spelling.

As it is, we can read books from centuries ago, since at least for some of them we can access dictionary comments on what words have changed meaning and on what meanings had different words back then, plus in quite a few cases it would be obvious from context.

I didn’t find Shakespear all that daunting. This is because we have preferred keeping the spelling over changing it and so making it consistent with a changing pronunciation.

Another problem with your proposal is, if you wanted to change English spelling to a condition consistent with today’s pronunciation, which one? London? New York? York, Edinburgh, Dublin? What’s inconsistent in one pronunciation is consistent in another one.

So, to anyone who knows about language and loves letters, which maybe really isn’t you, your proposal is way too costly for way too little to gain. It’s not phonetics that’s too complicated. It’s the kind of things that happen when spelling or pronunciation rules change. Like in 800 to 813, an Englishman[1] came to Tours to improve the pronunciation of Latin in Church. The attempt was successful, and yes it went on beyond his death in 804. But by 813 it was clear, Latin in Church was no longer the high style of a language everyone understood, it was a foreign language.

I’ll now cite what happened in 813 from wiki[2]

A Council of Tours in 813 decided that priests should preach sermons in rusticam romanam linguam (rustic romance language) or Theodiscam (German),[10] a mention of Vulgar Latin understood by the people, as distinct from the classical Latin that the common people could no longer understand.[11] This was the first official recognition of an early French language distinct from Latin.[12]

Theodiscam probably was closer to Dutch than to German. But the language of the people was not “Vulgar Latin” as a language originally distinct from Classical Latin, the language of the people was the continuation of Classical Latin, and the thing that made it no longer understandable was the change in pronunciation as per Alcuin of Tours. In 813, it’s a bit early to call this popular language “early French” because that took an extra step or two: applying approximately same pronunciation rules to show the pronunciation of the popular language, first example we have preserved being from 842[3] and then making this a regular feature, not a solution to help out a foreigner, first example of the regular feature we have observed being from around 880.[4]

So, rebooting spelling rules or pronunciation rules can result in language divorce, which is how I would describe what happened between Alcuin arriving in Tours and another cleric writing Sequence of Saint-Eulalia. Sorry for not sharing your enthusiasm.

Footnotes

[1] Alcuin - Wikipedia
[2] Council of Tours - Wikipedia
[3] Oaths of Strasbourg - Wikipedia
[4] Sequence of Saint Eulalia - Wikipedia