Doubtful.

Also, I think your "simpler" transcription is actually less phonologically accurate.

For instance, I would transcribe the "er" in "wonder" as [ɝ]. In some dialects, it would actually just be [ɜ] without any pronounced trace of the "r" like sound. In actuallity, I suspect that it is actually [ɜɹ] underlying, and the two sounds just coalesce into [ɝ] when you pronounce them.

That is to say, the "er" sound is viewed a variant of the vowel moreso than it is a variant of "r". I have the same complaint about "simplr" and "evr".

For "nglsh", I just do not see any motivation to remove the vowels. It is true that English allows "n" to act as a vowel, but in "English", there is a pretty clear [I] (as in Igloo) before the [n]. Similarly, [l] could act as a vowel, but there is also a pretty clear [I] following it.

Finally for "cach", I can't really complain about this being worse, as "ch" is our way of writing tsh ( /t͡ʃ/ ), but if we are simplifying English, it would be nice to clean up this too and show the relationship between that sound and the t sound.

Something that HN readers often don't understand is that being an engineer or having advanced understanding of a field does not equate having an understanding of linguistics, despite being a native speaker of a language. Merely striking out letters from words doesn't make a language or its spelling any simpler...

Not sure if that is directed at me, but I did minor in linguistics.

Certainly not at you, but at the comment you replied to and a lot of comments whenever linguistics-related topics come up here.

Thanks, although I am looking back at my comment and hitting myself for transcribing the vowel as [ɜ].

How long are we going to continually spell things like: knife, night, knight, thought, etc. When you add up the generations of wasted human effort in spelling words in such pointless ways, its mind boggling.

> spelling words in such pointless ways

Define "pointless". Each word has its own etymology, and if we're going to be honest here, the different spellings aren't _that_ complicated. Take it up with English's ancestors for borrowing words from many different languages, and then with more recent ancestors for the great vowel shift, among other things leading to change.

Language is never going to make sense. It's not prescriptive- we just make changes, arbitrarily, sometimes due to mistakes, and it either catches on or it doesn't. Trying to "fix" language is an impossible task because no one is making the rules. English in particular doesn't have a language council making decisions, unlike say, Korean. It doesn't matter anyways because "Standard English" is quite different than day to day conversation, and even in formal settings it's based on stylistic guidelines, not hard rules.

Just let it be- devising an _arbitrary_ method of attempting to corral an entire language is an impossible task. And any work would be undone within one generation anyways since languages evolve. Esperanto, a manufactured language, has already seen linguistic changes by its native speakers (kids who were taught it growing up).

Indefinitely.

If you want a history of attempts to fix it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

Spelling comes from the root of each individual word. It makes sense to keep them written this way. Not everything makes phonetic sense especially in English where imported words are countless.

what do you suggest instead: naif, nife, nyve ..?

nife is fine

Why is there an "e" at the end?

I'm reminded of how English orthography has that weird thing where the presence of a silent E can seemingly change the vowel in the previous syllable. For example the Tom Lehrer song, "who can turn a can into a cane? Silent E..."

So a hypothetical "nife" would never be mistaken for "neef", as "nif" could be.

Or mistaken for niff. [0]

(No, I didn't know this word existed before this moment.)

[0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/niff

Move to a phonetic alphabet. E.g. Arabic.

We could also just add accents, diacrits to exhaustion to englissh letters. Without that in arabic you couldn't even tell /a/, /e/, /i/ apart, they are all aleph in word initial position. Our orthographie is phine, your pronnuntzashun is just lazy

You can write phonetically on the Latin alphabet perfectly fine, for example Finnish does so. In the case of English, its a matter of standardizing the pronunciation of characters (considering it requires every English speaker to essentially learn to write/read again, just changing the alphabet to Arabic is almost easier).

There’s already a weird thing in certain cultures in the US - leaving out articles and possessives.

That mike car

Him going there

That's a dialect all languages have them

Neither of those examples are leaving out articles or possessives.

"Spectacles! Glasses are vessels from which one drinks."

-- my school teacher

I read ‘eve’ as ‘never’ multiple times while scanning your simple version...