> write how you speak

If you write how you speak I will not be able read what you write and vice versa. English has a wide range of dialects, nare you going to try to impose on on the rest of us. Someone like me used to broad West Country speech would spell rather differently than a Glaswegian for instance. Should we have diacritics to indicate stress? If so will you choose the common US (stress the ultimate syllable) or British practice (stress the ante-penultimate syllable)? In British English, the name Bernard is pronounced with the final vowel as an unstressed, almost elided, obscure vowel; but it is a stressed long a in US English.

I often see people demanding that English be written phonetically. Many of those people seem to be unaware that their own languages also have dialects and that they would be equally unable to write phonetically in a way that would satisfy all users of that language.

There have been numerous attempts at consistent auxiliary languages. None have become very popular. The only 'widely' used auxiliary is Esperanto and that has already shown itself to be subject to all the same evolutionary forces that drive changes in natural languages; people must invent new words and then they disagree about how to spell them, how to use them, what gender they must have; slang is created and eventually becomes normalized in some communities but not in others, etc.

> I often see people demanding that English be written phonetically. Many of those people seem to be unaware that their own languages also have dialects and that they would be equally unable to write phonetically in a way that would satisfy all users of that language.

Spanish is largely written as it's spoken. Even with its many accents and dialects, holding a spelling bee would be ridiculous because of how easy it is to deduct writing from pronunciation.

That being said, if it was reformed to the point where it absolutely was written as spoken, it would become very ugly.

I understand your point about regional dialects, I think the main issue is with old or borrowed words. I was inspired by the fact in Romania we had such a reform where the alphabet was changed and the rule of write how you speak was added. The accents are not written and regional languages have their special way of speaking certain words or even some special grammar but you learn in school the correct thing and the national radio/TV will speak correctly so there is no issue except with small children that would make small mistakes in the first year of learning to write. I don't expect this too happen soon and when it will happen the present generations would be the ones that would have to suffer the transition for the benefit of the new generations.

So if you can get objective and think about 150-300 years in the future , do you think there will be no changes to cleanup things in the language ?

> think about 150-300 years in the future , do you think there will be no changes to cleanup things

You can change it and clean it up all you like but that won't stop its evolution and a hundred years later the spelling and pronunciation will be out of sync again.

I don't mean that we should necessarily avoid reform but what you get when you do a serious reform is a new language that is different from all the dialects and it must either be imposed from above or be in some way sufficiently attractive for people to adopt it. And then you have another dialect.

See also the xkcd joke on standards, I think it applies here too: https://xkcd.com/927/

But did esperanto start with the defacto position that English has: the dominant worldwide language (at least economically speaking and certainly technologically).

I guess what I'm saying is maybe they should take a swing at making something similar to esperanto, but with a focus on making it as understandable by an english speaker as possible.

> In British English, the name Bernard is pronounced with the final vowel as an unstressed, almost elided, obscure vowel; but it is a stressed long a in US English.

I don't think you can generalize the US pronunciation this way. Source: This was my grandfather's name.

Agreed. That was rather my point, and I defer to your more specific knowledge.

The point is that there are many ways to pronounce the same word even within one country.

Bulgarian language seems to me extremely phonetic, to the point I can correctly write and read words and I still don't know what they mean.

I agree that having a more comprehensible writing system would help, but I also suspect that any serious attempt to change it now would be counter-productive.

If you don't get all the countries with an official interest in the language to agree to the change in sync, you're going to create a mess for proficient speakers and an even worse mess for learners by increasing the volume of spelling you have to learn. And even if it does work out, you're still going to create a mess for learners - especially the ones who don't have enough money to replace all their materials all at once - by creating an orthographic horizon.

I've also got my doubts about whether the end goal is even possible. 100 years ago, there was an effort in the UK to try and come up with a new native English alphabet in order to try and address this same problem. One of the reasons it failed was that, even within one country, the language's pronunciation wasn't regular enough to come up with a spelling system that's phonetic for all speakers. Since then, the gamut of pronunciation that can be considered official has only widened, meaning the possibility of creating a truly phonetic writing system for English has only become more remote.

It would be cool if a new, unambiguous and simple language was developed to talk exclusively to computers instead of natural languages. Something like Loglan/Lojban.

Since it would be taught everywhere, people might start using it as lingua franca. It would certainly be better than Esperanto, which is not better than other natural languages despite being artificial.