Attempts have already been made to do this without much overall success. The U.S. has some different spellings, most of which departed from British spelling in the early to mid 1800's and some even into the 1900's. For example, we write honor and color instead of honour and colour, center instead of centre, our cars have tires rather than tyres, we watch television programs rather than programmes. Like most changes to language, these developed slowly over time and not by some sort of decree. To me, this idea is sort of like some the posts that suggest that Esperanto should undergo major changes by decree. It just doesn't work that way.

Ingliŝ ŭut luk priti: stuit, if ŭon ŭrajc it for eksa:mpl wiþ þi Esperanto-leta:rs end sam ediŝenl staf lajk "þ" end ":".

Mustelvulpo:It just doesn't work that way.

It can work that way - it did with German. Of course you can’t force people to spell things in a particular way, but if official documents and schools had to use the new spelling, that would surely be sufficient.

Fenris_kcf:Ingliŝ ŭut luk priti: stuit, if ŭon ŭrajc it for eksa:mpl wiþ þi Esperanto-leta:rs end sam ediŝenl staf lajk "þ" end ":".

Esperanto also does not have enough vowels to support the English language.

darkweasel:

Mustelvulpo:It just doesn't work that way.

It can work that way - it did with German. Of course you can’t force people to spell things in a particular way, but if official documents and schools had to use the new spelling, that would surely be sufficient.

Yes, spelling changes can and do happen by decree. It happened in Portuguese 3 or 4 times in the last 100 or so years (too many reforms for my taste, only 1 or 2 were really useful and changed important things). By the way, in Brazil 2012 is the last year of the transition to our most recent spelling reform...

vejktoro:Hmm... Heart and Bear have the same vowel by many speakers around here.
'comb' ends without a breath of air and the lips stay closed a beat longer, while 'come' ends with a breath.

English has grown so big. Do I get to be the boss? or you?

Neither. The phonetic transcriptions, that all dictionaries have, will be the boss. It's no big deal if people have to mentally translate the spelling to their specific accent (they already do), the problem is just when the spellings simply "lie" about the pronunciation.

tommjames:What do people think of these obstacles?

Some of them:

Public resistance, local accents, reprinting, deaf people = Just don't go overboard, wiθ (wið) θinqz līke ðis. All languages have local accents, that doesn't mean that a crazy spelling is better than a regularized one.

Inflections = Not a problem, the article just says that there are two concurrent types of proposal.

Irregular spelling of very common words = Don't change them. Everyone can learn how to pronounce "one", "of" or "done" because they are used so often.

Etymology (not specifically mentioned, but implied in the second paragraph) = Portuguese, Spanish and Italian seem to do just fine without ch /k/, rh, ph and etymological y.

EldanarLambetur:I'd rather English was made so impossibly hard that even the natives wanted to pick up Esperanto for international communication!

That would be good too. Let's do this.

N-true:It's indeed very difficult (near to impossible) to change a language per decree over night.

I once read that Norwegian-language numerals were changed by decree at some time after WWII. (From German-style "two-and-twenty" to English-style "twenty-two".)

Forigite

Hyperboreus:This shouldn't be much of an issue: a lot of languages use diacritis and have no problem with it; or you can use digraphs (but which would break again a phoneme-grapheme bijection).

Let's take a look at RP:
RP has two close front vowel (iː and ɪ) standing in opposition concerning length: So let's map them to í and i.
One mid front vowel (ɛ), so let's use for this an e with a tail: ę
One open front vowel (æ), which we can take from German: ä
Two mid central vowels (ɜː and ə) again in length opposition: These would be é and e.
One open central vowel (ɐ or ʌ, allophones): ą
Two closed back vowels (uː and ʊ) again in length opposition: ú and u
One mid back vowel (ɔː): ó
Two open back vowels (ɑː and ɒ) again in length opposition: á and a

No funny diacritis, everything already known from other languages and full unicode support.

The diphthongs could be:
low: RP: eu, Am: ou
loud: au
lied: ai
lane: ei or äi
loin: oi
leer: ie
lair: ęe
lure: ue

Now we have to learn new diacritical marks, something that, outside of the, albeit rarely placed, trema and the occasional loan word, have been completely absent in the English language. Every book in English would have to be rewritten, a new keyboard configuration would need to be worked out, and, in the long run, it's not worth it. They might not be funny diacritics to you, but to native speakers of English, they might be.

I'm much more likely to keep writing "lair" than "lęer", which looks like "leer", which would be "lier" (depending on where you are), which, in the traditional system, is someone who lies or a common misspelling of "liar", and in the proposed system, is "liar", "lyre", and "lier".

Amelia12 wrote:

"People from other countries when it comes to verb conjugation actually have it quite easy- third person with s on the end, all other forms without, ie I say, you say, he/she says, we/they/you say. Other languages vary much more than this."

That is not quite true. Sometimes there is an extra -e- to be added as in the non-rhyming pair of "goes" and "does" (though as a noun "doe" the plural does rhyme with "goes" - "does"). Then there are all the auxiliary verbs that have no -s ending. And it turns out the when one pronounces that final -s it can be /s/, /z/ or /əz/ - the same holds for the final -d or -ed.

How do you pronounce "I read a book"? Is it present or past tense? Why are "wind" and "wind" spelled the same but pronounced differently? How about "bow" and "bow"? Honestly, even though I have spoken English (American) since I was five and wrote a dissertation in it, I still have problems with spelling.
Grades 1 through 5 - sometimes 6 - are mostly devoted to learning to spell. We take countless dictations and must participate in those horrible spelling-bees. And it is no wonder that it was an American company that invented spell-checker!!!Couldn't live without it!

I don't know if anyone else has noticed anything like this. I live in the NE USA.

But I think that, noticeably over a period of decades, the pronunciation I hear is actually getting closer to the spelling. As a child I don't remember hearing anyone pronounce the "t" in "often" or "soften". Now I hear it all the time, mostly from younger people.

I also notice fewer schwas, especially in words ending in "-ing". More and more I hear a clear short "i" sound. Again, mostly from younger people.

(Want phonetic spelling? Wait a while. Maybe someday we'll all be pronoucing the now-silent e's. Like in Chaucer's day ...)