The problem is regional accents and variations prevent a consistent shortened spelling. Take the word "scone" - is it prounced to rhyme with 'gone' (like I do), or 'bone' (like some people do)? Should 'bath' be pronounced with a long or a short vowel? And if it is a long vowel, what about 'daffodil'?

Well, bath the noun is short (like mad) where as bath the verb (also spelled bathe) is the long (like made). And seeing as a scone is usually as hard as a stone... :-)

But the joke only works if scone rhymes with gone. And my scones are soft and fluffy...

And bathe is long but bath is long when it's "barth" - as in town :)

I have not had the time to read through the discussion as this is a busy time of year for me, but @Ursa, no, I do not believe English needs to go through a spelling reform. While the spelling and pronunciation have an apparent disconnect, this "disconnect" attests to the heritage of the English language and the vast number of influences it has had. I think that spelling reform would be an injustice to the language, just as the Soviet reforms to Russian did a great disservice. If there were a spelling reform, we should add more characters to indicate pronunciation (read: heritage) or add diacritic marks to words, not fundamentally change the spelling.

@ Pete-- "Long" and "short" are used to described different sounds even though they aren't necessarily actually long and short in English, because vowel length is not phonemic in English. If I say Aaaaat or At, it's still considered the same sound, but in German and some other languages, how long you hold the vowel sound actually changes the meaning of a word, such as "Stadt" and Staat," in which the only difference in pronunciation is the length of the vowel sound.

I prounce bath the same way as Pete U. Baaarrth... with the aaa sounding like "open up and say "aaahh". Its definitely a long sound.

Right/ Clarity needed. As a northerner, I pronounce bath with a short a, unless I am referring to the town of Bath, which is pronounced Barth, which I would describe as a long a (or a posh southern poncey a ;) )

Bathe is more like bayth, and is distinct.

We do this because a) we pick up social class and locale from some vowel sounds and b) because it annoys the hell out of non-English speakers ;)

So kind of short o sounding... Bath=Both? Why the "r"s in it? There are no "r"s in bath. Of course, the folks in Boston "warsh their cahs." so I guess you can "give ya' cah a barth".

No Draug - it really does sound like they've stuck an 'r' into the words. It's a south England think (mostly). Bar-th rather than ba-th, grar-ss rather tahn gra-ss and so on

It's not really an r sound. I say bath and it rhymes with car. But I don't roll the r in either case. Car = cah

Who knows a good "What dialect do you speak?" quiz online? I took one that pegged me exactly, but now I can't find it again.

@Pete - Yeah I've heard that particular accent on Doctor Who and Top Gear now that you mention it.

English spelling is about as reformed as it's going to get without destroying etymological data necessary for comprehension-- it's just inescapable when you're using the Latin alphabet for a Germanic language. Can't use a language with five vowels to represent a language with what, twelve?

If English were to have any kind of "spelling reform" it would need to have a major orthographic reform first-- at very least, reintroducing the letters þ and ð plus the use of accents and umlauts.

"reintroducing the letters þ and ð"

Best idea I've heard in a while.

"English spelling is about as reformed as it's going to get without destroying etymological data necessary for comprehension"
+1

"reintroducing the letters þ and ð"
What do these letters do?

"þ and ð" are "th and dh" or for more standard the "th" in "thin" and the "th" in "then"

Sounds pretty groovy.

"Well for you bad spellers out there, as I tell my students, "It's not your fault--It's English!" :-)"

Actually I blame the French. It was a perfectly phonetic, Germanic language until 1066. Even with thorn and eth re-introduced it only solves unvoiced vs. voiced "th".

As George Bernard Shaw said, you can still spell fish "ghoti"

gh as in enough
o as in women
ti as in definition

Actually blaming the French is historically speaking rarely a bad idea, for anything that happens in the world really.

The two main problems with spelling reform are this:

1) Spelling wasn't really a big deal in English until the invention of the printing press. Shakespeare famously spelled his own name six or so different ways. It's easy to go into old manuscripts and see that the same author would frequently spell a word tow or three different ways within the same text. In spite of my earlier quip about the French, spelling was just not that big a deal until it was necessary to standardize it.

2) If we go to a phonetic spelling, then whose phonetic spelling? Settling on any one dialect/accent will leave the majority of the English speaking world with a "phonetic" system that has little resemblence to thier own pronunciation (not that it would be that big a difference). The Midwestern American accent as decided upon as Broadcast American English only because it was the most widely understandable to audiences.

**tow** should be two (but you probably already knew that)

"reintroducing the letters þ and ð"

Except then we have to redo the typewriter keyboard and add two letters to it. Also, it screws up the alphabet song. And where will they fall anyhow? :-)

Put eth right after ess to challenge the two year olds with the song. Never know it might reduce the number of lisps in that age group.

As far as typewriters and keyboards go. If we keep it a secret initially we might get a jump on the Chinese in business machine production.

The typewriters (keyboards actually as I don't then anyone even uses electric typewriters any more) could actually be fixed by having the word processing software substitue þ for the and ð for dh and then teach everyone to type dhen instead of then. It would have the added advantage of eliminating that age old typo, teh, because we would be typing dhe (making the new typo ehd because d and e are so close together).

Still somebody has to change something, whether software or hardware, we have jobs increasing :-)

we have the 'alt gr' key for a reason...

mine turns = into ≠
+ into ±
/ into ÷
? into ¿
$ into ¢

along with some nice characters such as ¡™©€§º“‘æ«…≤≥
actually it also does d -> ð and t -> þ... hmm i never knew that they were for until this thread...

t -> †
MacBook

OK, so the Mac folks have something us Microsoft folks don't. They also have a hardware/OD environment the company controls like a fucking dictator. :-) Bet seriously, have you ever tried to get Apple to let you release a product written for the Mac?