Two Jays

All English spelling reforms are bad. That’s OK, this is not a spelling reform, it’s a jeu d’ésprit.

They all have a big decision to make: what to do about ‘c’? It can be replaced by ‘s’ or ‘k’ everywhere except in ‘ch.’ But no-one really likes the letter ‘k,’ either, so that’s not very appealing. There is a rule for how to pronounce ‘c,’ though it’s broken so often that many English speakers don’t even know what it is. Here it is: ‘c’ before ‘e’ or ‘i’ is pronounced ‘s’, otherwise ‘k.’ That rule lets us pronounce a word if we know how to spell it, but it doesn’t help with spelling a word if we know the pronunciation. For that we need a new rule, which will also add some weirdness to the mix: the sound ‘s’ before ‘e’ or ‘i’ is always spelled ‘c;’ the sound ‘k’ not before ‘e’ or ‘i’ is also always spelled ‘c.’ This gives us some funny-looking words like ‘cing’ (but still ‘sang,’ ‘sung’), ‘cilly’ and ‘cexy,’ as well as ‘cosher,’ ‘corea’ and ‘King Cong.’ No problem.

Plurals in English are formed with ‘-s,’ as a rule. But this ‘s’ is sometimes pronounced as an ‘s’, sometimes as a ‘z.’ This might not be too obvious, but ‘clogs,’ ‘bangs’ and ‘whims’ all sound ‘z,’ even though they are spelled ‘s.’ ‘Laps,’ ‘hats’ and ‘clocks,’ on the other hand, sound ‘s.’

Unfortunately, the letter ‘z’ looks unfamiliar to readers of English. But, no compromise! So we are going to have ‘clogz,’ ‘bangz’ and ‘whimz.’ It’s ugly. Oh well.

The main obstacle is that here are far more sounds than letters, and some sounds have no letters at all. This is particularly true in the vowels, where there are about 18 vowel sounds, and only 5 letters to write them with. But it’s true for consonants, too. That means that we are going to have to invent some completely new spellings, which is in direct opposition to the goal that regularly spelled words should be unchanged. But the first 2 principles are more important, so let’s bite the bullet.

There are 2 sounds that share the spelling ‘th’. There’s ‘th’ as in ‘thing’, ‘thought’, ‘thigh’ and ‘th’ as in ‘the’, ‘there’, ‘thy.’ Indeed, the last of these, ‘thigh’ and ‘thy,’ differ in no other way. So we need to make up a completely new spelling. Ick. Since we need voiced and unvoiced ‘th,’ we should use the voiced and unvoiced pair ‘t’, ‘d,’ which gives us ‘thing’, ‘thought’, ‘thigh,’ ‘dhe,’ ‘dhere,’ ‘dhy.’ Already, after only a single thought, this is starting to look very ugly. But let’s soldier on.

So many words in the English language have an “irregular” spelling, or so we are told. But no-one knows what the regular spelling would be. How could they? But let’s think about what English would look like if it were spelled regularly. This would mean a few things.

—If you know how to pronounce a word, you should be able to spell it.

—If you know how to spell a word, you should be able to pronounce it.

—Words that everyone agrees do not have an irregular spelling should be spelled exactly the same.

But of course it’s more complicated than that. The main obstacle is that people don’t pronounce words the same way. There are dialects. This itself wouldn’t be a problem, necessarily, as long as the same spelling always led to the same pronunciation for each dialect, but this isn’t true either: there’s the trap-bath split, there’s the cot-caught merger, there’s the wine-whine merger, there are rhotic and non-rhotic dialects, and more. Let’s take those 4 examples, and do what we can with them anyway.

So, what would “regular” English spelling look like?