ceigered:What's this chestnut of /U/ and /V/? I'm not familiar with the phonetic representation being used (I'm guessing it's X-Sampa), but I am now interested...

Broadly speaking, you can make a "north/south" division of England English dialects according to the short-U phoneme. In "the north" there is only /U/, but in "the south" there's /V/ as well. The classic example words are "put" and "putt", which in the north are both pronounced /pUt/ but which down south are pronounced /pVt/ and /pUt/ respectively. The SoundSpel representations are "u" and "uu" respectively.

I can't remember any specific threads, but there have been threads in language forums where someone has posted a spelling system proposal, and other members have written posts using it. When people from around the world do this, you realise how different the dialects are. And not just in terms of realisations, but in terms of which phonemes are used where.

Personally, if I was gonna respell English, I'd pick a "standard" dialect and render everything in that.

I see, so basically the problem of dialects which don't have the same sounds could render some of a proposal like Interspel rather ineffective if there is no "standard".

Then the problem is what standard... If one were to be picked, while I wouldn't have said this a year ago, I feel that standard US English or Received Pronunciation is probably the best to model a reformed writing system. I would have been worried that this would start to influence local accents and whatnot, but after thinking about this for a year on-and-off, I don't think that having a new spelling system based off of a "standard" dialect would affect regional accents too much, since they'd probably sound the same with just a few things changed in the odd couple of words no doubt.

orthohawk:

Roberto12:

Something else important is that a new "regular" system would actually still be problematic, because of how many different dialects of English there are in the world. This can easily be seen if multiple people from around the world all write message in a new system and compare them. It's shocking how "screwed up" other people's dialects can then seem.

this problem can be largely dealt with by using a Revived Cornish model: "However you pronounce the "short o" this is how you spell it"

I do have a certain fondness for that strategy, as it gets us used to adapting to new ways of writing etc.

But I doubt the public would like it since they'd put it down to total anarchy, and given society as it is these days, it wouldn't surprise me if some people somehow took "write how you pronounce it" and turned it into something it was never meant to be

I would be very happy with a simplified spelling for English. Either Interspel or SoundSpel look OK.

What annoys me most is that, even after you have learned a complex spelling, you still find ridiculous inconsistencies, for example "recipe". It should be "recipee", at least.

Does anyone have a complete reference manual for one of the above-mentioned English spelling reforms? All I can find are guidelines and summaries about the changes, or papers explaining the motivation behind the reform. Even if I wanted to write in a completely reformed spelling, I couldn't do it without a reference manual/dictionary... And I still feel that I would not look much smarter than people who write "how r u? kthxbye"

(I feel a bit silly writing in English when i could use Esperanto You will all notice my unnatural writing style)