ACBob's ZimZam English needs a spelling reform - Sans the Thorn!
I did try to keep it minimal, but for neccesity I kept IPA-chart symbols. I'm not sure how that'll sound in a screen reader.
Ahh. English. What an... awful, awful language. Ripe with words taken from different places because we felt like it, to just plain old inconsistencies. A classic addage, "I before E, except after C"... Unless you're ageing, ancient, or you've broken your cleidomastoid1 during a leisure venture while overseeing your reindeer that's seizing a plebeian monotheist.
We've borrowed so many words it can be quite rough on our through-put of thoroughly crafted written works. the same characters can be used to pronounce many different sounds, and that's just plain confusing. We drop certain sounds when we feel like it, at our own discretion. Take 'knight' for example, surely pronounced /knixt/, right? Nope, we drop the 'k' and the 'gh' to give us /naɪt/. We didn't even provide any indication that it was going to be a diphthong.
But that's simply what happens to languages, as the years travel along and people speak it. It'll drift around aimlessly, the sounds updating. Behold; a concept known as a spelling reform! With its power, you can take a language and completely fix the spelling issues with it. A lot of languages in the world have decided upon and started spelling reforms. German, French, Russian, Hebrew, what-have-you, they've all had spelling reforms in one way or the other. You know who hasn't2 had any spelling reforms? that's right, English.
Now-now, I'm not suggesting we do anything radical like the Deseret3 alphabet, just a simple reform. You've no doubt seen the thorn (or eth) character that's been dominating the page. thorn is a lovely character, is it not? It's a character English used to have. Way back when, in the distant time of Middle English, English was written and spoken with thorns. A "th" = "th" /θ/. But I propose we don't stop there, nay, let us continue and go farther. Icelandic is a language. Peeking at its' alphabet, we see things that you'd expect from the group of "European" alphabets, Æ, Ö, etc. But it also has two funny lil' symbols. th/th and th/th (/th/), thorn and Eth. In-fact, Icelandic is the ONLY language still alive today that uses thorn. It's pretty lonely.
So, I propose that much like the Icelandic people, we take on the reformed characters of thorn and eth. Icelandic too introduced both as an act of reform, so why can't we?
- "With different dialects, it's impractical to have phonemic characters for all of them!"
It sounds like that's less my fault, and more your fault for still calling them English. Anything along the lines of "Aye 'ah noo, It's a wee shame aye, we need t' look in'tae it." Makes me question the integrity of the phrase 'dialect'. Don't get me started on anything American.
Keep in mind though, I substituted thorn based on how I pronounce words, through that method it'd be different for you. But I'd think if we're reforming the language, we'd work it out.