this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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English needs a spelling reform badly. Like the whole point of writing is to put speech in writing. It makes no sense to have spelling be this detached from pronunciation.
busy should be bizy for example
English has the problem of taking words literally from other languages including the pronunciation.
Kindergarden - > German. The I gets pronounced differently.
Tibia - > Latin. Fuck who knows how it is pronounced, just do what you want.
Bureaucracy - > French. Yeah well the French hate people who want to learn their language, I guess. Nothing is written like it is pronounced
You call French inconsistent, I call you ignorant of its rules. They are many, they are complex, they don't make sense (but, surprisingly, languages don't ever make sense, they just are), but are for the most part consistent. Especially compared to English.
In French, "eau" is pronounced like "o". It's dumb. But it's always true. Meanwhile, the "i" in "alive" and "live" are pronounced differently for no good reason.
The I in alive and live are pronounced the same, but the I in alive and live are different. English is fascinating, but I do not envy those learning it as a second language.
Learning French and finding that irregular verbs are rare blew me away.
https://www.topito.com/top-explications-prononciations-langue-francaise
Most French comment ever made that doesn't include cheese and wine, in that it admits it's basically the exact same as English but must pretend it is superior nonetheless.
Tinder.
Validating your point: https://grammarhow.com/kindergarten-or-kindergarden/
This is a non-trivial task, and not simply because people will refuse to change their habits as they always do.
You say that "busy" should be "bizy", but are you sure about that? If we decide that Y should always have an "ee" sound, what do you do with words that start with Y? Or are we going to make it the rule that it always has a Y sound at the beginning of a word and an ee sound at the end? What about a word like "ripe"? That's a different-sounding I than the one you have in "bizy", so would that be "ryp"? In that case, you have to have 3 pronunciations for Y: one each for when it occurs at the beginning, ending, and inside a word.
Perfect is the enemy of good and all that
In Germany the spelling reform was adapted pretty broadly, there are few people who stick with the old spelling and that is of course their right
Over time, that is what normally happens to language (even French, yeah looking at you Gauls).
But, English and especially North American English is so predominate in the world, that may stop its otherwise natural development.
/not a linguist just friends with some.
English just needs a new orthography. Languages change in many ways, and phonetic drift is natural, it's just that there hasn't been a spelling reform to accommodate them, and at this point it's gotten out of hand.
Even French? a lot of the horribly spelled words in English are their fault!
Nah, we just need to go back to the old pronunciation.*
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oFX1nbD3dV0
"Knight" used to be pronounced as it's spelt. "Outside" used to said like oot-si-deh.
*I am actually just kidding about that first part, but I do find it fascinating how much the spoken word has moved away from the originally phonetic spelling.