Back in college, I obsessed over English spelling reform. Why deal with silent gh’s, I figured, when things can be so much cleaner? So I started inventing phonetically-precise alphabets, ending up with results like this:

Tu bii or not tu bii, that iz dhy kweschn!

Or sometimes I’d get fancy with the diacritics:

Tú haushóldz bóth ëlaik in dignití…

Or I’d mess around with phonemically contrastive capital letters and punctuation marks in place of vowels:

D.-kw:l.t’-.v-mrs’-‘z-n:t-str!nd–

That last one is from Portia’s monologue in The Merchant of Venice. Clearly!

Alas, I was unaware at the time that a Germanic cousin was attempting widespread spelling reform, and the results were mixed, to say the least. Here’s Robert Lane Greene on what happened in Germany:

One state had 60% of voters reject the reforms in a referendum; two others announced they would ignore the reform, which had been the product of 10 years’ work. One of Germany’s most venerable papers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, reverted to the old spelling in 2000, and the Spiegel and the entire Springer-Verlag followed.

Keep in mind that these reforms were extremely minor compared to the top-down reboot I imagined in my late teens. I would probably agree with said reforms, were I a German speaker. And if modest attempts to regularize the grapheme /ß/ has the potential to cause such a ruckus, one can only imagine the outrage if we added unfamiliar double vowels and umlauts to English. More.

See: Dialect Blog

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