In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a movement to make English spelling rational by either phonetic spelling reform or an entirely new script. It's never happening. They tried to make it happen for a century, and that was BEFORE computers. By now, the way words are spelled is so entrenched that it's essentially permanent. Obviously there's IPA but it will never be the common orthography, especially since dialects make a "universal IPA spelling" impossible.However, hear me out. If the written word is immovable, then there's still a way to rationalize pronunciation, which is just to pronounce everything how it's written. I'm not saying it's a good idea or wouldn't sound stupid at first, but it's *possible*.It might even be an organic process, there are already obscure words that get mispronounced a lot because most people read them rather than hearing them spoken. Imagine a future where 90% of interaction is typed (some people are almost there, honestly), pronunciation would basically reinvent itself.Is this a serious recommendation or prediction? No. Just something that crossed my mind.
It was never going to happen in the 19th/20th centuries either. In the mid 20th there were various schools which taught with these alternate scripts/spellings, it was a massive failure and the students left school being functionally illiterate.Pronunciation is constantly reinventing itself, as is language. Just the standard natural evolution.
If things keep going the way they are, the world will develop a common pidgin and individual languages will mostly die out or more accurately become dialects of the pidgin.
>>24689331Fuck I hope not.The best defense against it is that it sounds extremely silly to other (some would say fluent) speakers of the language.
>>24689347That would not be an issue because by that point a fluent speaker of English would be the equivalent of a fluent speaker of Latin today; English would be a dead language. Even with the help of the internet this will take centuries.I guess it would technically be a creole by that point but the dialects could be pidgins and never stabilize.
>>24689314Dialects actually aren't too bad. You could try to make it consistent for old Queen's English, and that accent has none of the new mergers (e.g. Americans pronounce "Mary", "merry" and "marry" the same way, it's 3 different sounds in RP) and all the common splits (e.g. trap / bath have a different A) so if you make a system for it, you can easily adapt the system to every other dialect, because functionally they're all the same thing with slight simplifications.
>>24689314"Salmon" is an example of this. The "L" had been silent for hundreds of years, disappeared, was then reintroduced, and now some people pronounce it.
