Many of you may agree that our spelling is crazy, but ask yourselves why we don't just fix our current spelling, instead of changing to a new alphabet. This page will explore that option in more detail, so you can see for yourself whether you like the results. We'll use only the familiar 26-letter English alphabet, and I'm not even going to use the letters q or x at all!

Like we do now, we're going to write at the level of phonemes, not phones. For example, we usually pronounce the t in till as aspirated, with a little puff of air after the release. But t is not aspirated after s, as in still, nor at the end of a syllable, as in sit. It's not even aspirated at the beginning of an unstressed syllable unless it's the first. In words like metal and water, it's pronounced as a flap. But we're going to ignore all that and write a simple t in all those cases, and the same for p k ch.

Likewise, the l after a vowel is dark - oil doesn't sound like oily - but we're not going to write that differently, either. If there's no confusion between sounds - no minimal pairs - then we're going to use the same letter. We're not trying to develop a phonetic script here, since this spelling is only for English.

Let's start with the consonants, since they're easier. The English alphabet is only missing six English consonants, the ones at the beginnings of shin chin thin this and at the ends of beige sing. The first three and the last already have very well-known digraphs, so we'll just use those:

The sound in this is the voiced version of the th, so let's write it with the voiced version of t:

We'll use the same trick with the sound in beige, which is the voiced version of sh:

There are two other consonant sounds that occur in some dialects of English: the voiceless wh in dialects where whine doesn't sound like wine - we can continue to write that as wh - and the fricative k in Scots loch, which we can write kh.

We'll always use the letter j to write the sound of judge. The letter g will only be used for the sound in gag (and in ng).

When the ng sound is followed by a g sound, you'll have to double the g:

We'll always use the letter z to write the sound of zoos. The letter s will only be used for the sound in sauce (and in sh).

We'll always use the letter k to write the sound of kick. The letter c will only be used in ch.

The digraph ph will always be respelled as f.

The digraph qu will always be respelled as kw.

The English vowels are much harder! English has seven short vowels and two long vowels:

In American English, we pronounce the boss vowel like the long vowel in bought. Commonwealth speakers pronounce bath like balm, while Americans pronounce it like bat.

It may surprise you to think of the ir of bird as a vowel, but it is. It's also written er as in mother, or as in author, ar as in mustard, and ur as in murmur. When r is used as a consonant, as in rail, it's a semivowel just like y in Yale and w in wail. These three semivowels are also used to form diphthongs: a short vowel followed by a semivowel offglide. There are 12 of them in English, plus four triphthongs that are straightforward combinations of diphthongs.

There are also three reduced vowels that only appear in unstressed syllables. You can hear them in the second syllables of little Rosa's roses. But we won't give them separate letters.

Here are all 21 stressed vowels, plus the four triphthongs:

We have only five vowel letters and three semivowel letters to write all 28 vowels with, so we'll have to write some of them as two letters: a digraph.

Our traditional spelling tries to get around this problem using rules. For example, one clever idea took advantage of the fact that short vowels can never end a syllable, so go must be long. But what if the long vowel has a following consonant? The rule is to mark the short vowel by doubling the following consonant: latter is short, while later is long. But what if there are two consonant letters afterwards, like bath and bathe? Then we have to insert a silent e to show that the consonant isn't really double. What about pals and pales? There, we need to insert the silent e before the second consonant. What about pant and paint (not panet)? Finally, we have to give up and spell the long vowel a different way.

In the end, the idea of marking vowel length anywhere but on the vowel turned out to be a mess, although we still use it. But I think the principle is clear: keep each sound in one place, even if it's written with two letters. There's even a broader principle in evidence, too: don't use rules! Let's just spell each sound in a consistent way.

We'd also like to keep the sound of each letter and digraph as close as possible to the current spelling. After all, if we're keeping this Roman alphabet despite all its flaws, it makes no sense to change the values of the letters, for example using x for sh and q for ch like they do in Chinese pinyin.

But here we're confronted with a problem: the Great Vowel Shift. A few hundred years ago, long i changed its pronunciation from beet to bite, long e changed its pronunciation from bait to beet, and long a changed its pronunciation from balm to bait. Likewise, long u changed its pronunciation from boot to bout, long o changed its pronunciation from boat to boot, and long ou changed its pronunciation from bought to boat. But the spelling didn't change, so we pronounce words like bee and boo as if they were spelled biy and buw.

But if we spell bay with an a, then we lose the ability to decompose the diphthong into its elements, e and y. So in the scheme below, I'm going to "undo" the Great Vowel Shift, and write the diphthongs correctly. Here's my version of the 25 stressed vowels, shown using the excellent Color Vowel System:

The table above shows the phonemes of American English. Americans don't distinguish between the a of palm almond lager and the o of lot olive sock. Speakers of Island dialects (Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Jamaica, Singapore, ...) would write the first as ah, and would pronounce all the r's after vowels as schwa offglides or simple lengtheners. They also pronounce bath with the almond lager vowel, and cloth with the olive sock vowel.

So now let's look at the results. Here's the opening paragraph of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, first in traditional orthography, then in the spelling from the Fixing the Latin Alphabet page, and finally in our New English orthography:

What do you think?

The history of spelling reform in English is long and sad - sad, because despite more than a century of work, almost nothing has been accomplished. The only success has been Noah Webster's reforms of 1828: center color check defense. But Islanders (and some Canadians!) still write centre colour cheque defence. US President Theodore Roosevelt mandated some spelling simplifications in 1906, but the Congress reversed him 4 months later. Playwright George Bernard Shaw sponsored the development of an excellent new alphabet for English in 1960, but it never gained support. An Australian linguist, Harry Lindgren, called for a gradual step-by-step reform, and his first stage - SR1 - was briefly used after 1975, but it never went any further.

One difficulty that spelling reform proposals have always come up against is division within the ranks of the reformers. The basic split is between conservatives that want to change as little as possible, and radicals who are willing to change everything if it fixes the problem. I'll remind you all that the problem is not reading and writing - as Chinese shows, that can be done with a completely arbitrary collection of symbols. The problem is learning - and English spelling is hard to learn!

Obviously, a reform that makes worthless the years of study that current readers have put into mastering English spelling won't be popular with them, while the future readers who have yet to waste those years are not represented in the meetings, even though they are a much larger group (and everybody who didn't want to throw away their years of study when Webster was proposing his reforms is long dead).

As you can tell, I'm a radical. I think we should be writing English in the best possible alphabet, even if that makes it harder for current readers. After all, many languages - Turkish, Albanian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, and all the Central Asia languages - have all changed alphabets, some more than once. Even English changed to the Roman alphabet from its original Runic alphabet, long ago! In a surprisingly short time, the old is forgotten and the new seems natural.

As this page shows, even the best efforts to reform spelling using the current alphabet will result in a less-than-ideal solution, using digraphs for missing letters as well as for diphthongs. A reform along the lines described above would elicit just as much resistance as using a new alphabet, while accomplishing much less. And as Shaw noted, using a new alphabet means that people don't see the reforms as simply misspellings.

A solution based on Musa (or a similar new alphabet) has several other advantages that no less radical solution will ever have. Most important, the same alphabet is used for other languages with the same sound values, which makes learning a foreign language much easier, and makes it much easier for foreigners to learn English. In addition, the Musa letters are featural; their shape is not arbitrary. The Musa keyboard is much smaller than a Roman keyboard. And Musa letters don't have different upper- and lower-case forms, nor different handwritten and printed forms.

We've been trying conservative measures for more than a century, in the faith that asking for less makes the proposals more likely to be accepted. But that hasn't worked, so far. Let's try asking for more!