Almost anything would be easier to read than Shavian.

Amen. I cannot not matter how hard I try read a text without the key......and even then it's hard. Writing in it isn't too much of a problem for me but reading in it....forget it.

Also even though many make overs of the English writing system have failed I still would like to see a new attempt. If only Deseret had caught on....such a pretty writing system. I use it though. No such writing system like that should go to waste.

It's a crime in a sense. I mean it makes things much simpler in alot of ways. 30 letters isn't too much more then 26. Plus no more confusion with the vowels either nor the consonants.

What a shame though. *Sigh*

I can't see any orthography not based on the Latin alphabet being adopted for English, not the least one invented by the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

WHAT?!

Oh come on! Why not?

Identity, history.

I mean I suppose we could write every language on Earth in the IPA but people wouldn't want to give up their traditional scripts. The Latin alphabet is as much a part of Western culture as the Arabic abjad is for the Islamic world and Chinese characters for East Asia.

It can't be done because English has become too divided. Some dialects are rhotic others aren't; vowels are different throughout the Anglosphere; various mergers and splits are common with different effects. You can't change the writing system for English and have it be less confusing or equally understandable between the different dialects.

That hasn't stopped languages like Finnish or Azeri from developing a written standard. Presumably we pick one prestigious accent as the model and work from there. With allowance for some spelling differences between dialects (which we already have) we'd be laughing.

Problem is, have you ever tried to create a reasonably phonemic representation of English with just the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet? I don't think it can be done. We could adopt additional letters and diacritics, but we have seemed to be remarkably resilient to that in the past.

Are Finnish or Azeri as varied as English where a phonetic orthographic re-haul would underhand dialects?

I picked my own accent as the “prestige” one, and made a modified version of the Latin alphabet for it. (I’m still working on creating a computer image of it for you all to see.) Since it was originally created with the intent of being used by a society of thousands of duplicates of myself (don’t ask, I haven’t always been as sane as I am at present), one accent was all I needed to represent.

I think the only way to make it work with ALL dialects is to adopt so many vowels that every accent has several that sound the same, but which sounds those actually are and which ones sound the same would vary from dialect to dialect. Learning it would be problematic, so you’d have no net benefit over the current “system” (gsteemso stifles a laugh).

As I understand it both have a number of dialects which probably diverge more than the three main varieties of English. The principle is the same: pick a standard and go with it.