(2012-12-04) American Spelling Reform

Dmitry Orlov has gotten frustrated with the insanity of American spelling and its cost in terms of level of Liter Acy (Reading And Writing).

The idea came to me as I was thinking of a good demonstration project for an exercise in practical anarchy, where a few individuals acting autonomously can make a big difference and provide an alternative to a vast, entrenched, dominant, horribly flawed system... I believe I can solve it because I happen to be a trained linguist, and although I haven't delved too deeply into English phonology (until now) I know the principles. I also happen to be a software engineer, and, as it happens, the task of making this project work is 1% linguistic analysis and 99% software engineering. I think that it is realistic to make the 40,000 or so books available through Project Gutenberg also available in this new form by piping them all through a piece of software, which is yet to be written.

Wikipedia has a nice review of past attempts at this. As one of Orlov's commenters notes, sticking with the current alphabet will maintain support for the ASCII used in computers. (Spelling Reform Movement)

The task at hand is not to create a new way of writing English using the Latin alphabet, since that's already been done, in spots and in stripes. It's called Lolcat. I'm not sure I buy that, but he defines some requirements that are interesting. And ends up with: <http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JFURa6tXmrM/UMZbDNpprEI/AAAAAAAADcc/qb1OTIOSY94/s1600/Glyph Table.png>