I almost feel like English should start from scratch with spelling, There are basically no consistent rules at all. I think we should assign spelling to kindergartners who actually follow the rules of English and spell things like they should be spelled.
Quinoa -> Keen-wa
Ballet -> Baal-Eh
Design -> De-zine
etc.
I don’t pronounce those words the way you’ve spelt it and I suspect if you paid close attention you don’t either. There are 20 vowel sounds in English and 5 vowel letters. Anyone who insists you can achieve phonetic regularity with the garbage writing system that is the latin alphabet should get their ears checked. Next time you hear some European brag about how their writing systems are “phonetically regular” just remember that Italians spell “gabagool” as “capicola”. Phonetic spelling is less about actually spelling things how people pronounce them and more about gaslighting people into believing that they’re pronouncing it wrong if they don’t match the spelling. Continental Europeans, being particularly weak willed and provincial, are more easily gaslit into this. The one good thing about the British is that they managed to jurry-rig a facsimile of logography with the shit orthographic hand they’ve been dealt.
this is a feature of Sopranese
I’d love to witness the chaos if English switched to IPA for spelling because of all the differences in accent and regional pronunciation.
I feel like it would fragment written English into something that is borderline mutually-unintelligible between different regions.
If you’ve ever read any old English writing that hasn’t been edited to reflect modernised spelling but instead it’s a wild mess lacking standardisation that you sorta have to read aloud as you sound out the words to make sense of them, like a kid learning to read, I think that’s what it would devolve into.
It would be super neat to have someone whose native written script is the IPA too - it would be fascinating to see how that shapes the way they see the world.
as an Italian I have to remind you that “gabagool” and “capicola” are not Italian words. I had to look them on internet. There are definite rules for reading Italian; I can understand the pronunciation from the written text with little ambiguity. Spelling contests are not a thing here.
OK apparently the standard italian spelling is “capocollo”. I’ve only ever seen it spelled capicola or gabagool in the US. Wiktionary also lists capicollo, capicolla, and cappicola. Honestly just highlights my point. There’s what, 70mil Italian speakers? Imagine having to deal with this for the Billions of English speakers.
I’m not an Italian speaker but from what I remember. Italian Americans pronounce it “gabagool” because that’s how 19th c. Neopolitan pronounces that word, and presumably the “proper” spelling of “capicola” also comes from that region/era. c —> g, p —> b, and dropping word final vowels are apparently the phonemic rules for that dialect. Little subtleties like that exist for basically every phonetic writing system, even ones artificially constructed to be phonetically regular like Pinyin or Hangul. I’m sure if you asked Tony Soprano he would also think “capicola” is a perfectly phonetically regular way to spell it the same way French people don’t think the extra consonants at the end of french words are extraneous.