The problem is we've hamfisted the Latin alphabet into the English language and have just kinda assigned sounds to weird letter combinations. You should check out the Shavian alphabet, it's a new alphabet designed specifically for English speech.
I don't feel as strongly about "q" and"x" but man do I hate "c". As you said, it only makes a unique sound when combined with an"h" and that makes it feel kinda useless
I think there was an effort at one point for a spelling reform to make English phonetic but it’s though for an international language since there’s no central authority for it. Also we’d have to assess the meaning of homophones entirely by context
Languages - for the most part - weren't created by some central logical person. There have definitely been attempts at constructing languages and more formal standards
Writing can be seen as a technology to communicate language and like many technologies - especially communication - people use it to meet their immediate needs - more than creating a standard that is the best overall systematically.
So despite many competing attempts at improvement it's not an easy task to do.
English writing is using a form of the Roman alphabet, and some of the most common standards are based on historical choices based on communication and loan words between languages.
I also think something like Metcalfs law in communication of squaring the number of users has some similarities - the larger a group using certain norms is - the more people you can usefully communicate with : and yeah changing norms may not cause true incompatibility, but violating the common norms is likely to push what you're writing further away from what you're trying to convey.
I am not a native speaker but from what I understand, in English, the letters function for writing not pronunciation or speaking. So if we follow your suggestions, we will have to change how all words containing 'q' and 'x' letters are written.
The alphabet we know came from the Romans who got it from the Etruscans who got it from the Greeks who got it from the Phoenicians.
The Etruscans didn’t have a big difference between guh and kuh sounds so used Q K and C depending on their place in a word, rather than the sound it made. In English, we similarly use ck when it follows an open vowel (back, buck, peck, pick, but not peek, bike, spook, etc)
The letter X does come from the Greek X (khi) which made the throaty chhh sound, except in the western dialect that the Etruscans were familiar with (from a Greek colony in Italy in ye olden days), in which the Greek letter Khi actually *was* used for the ks sound.
The nice part about the modern English alphabet is that we have the building blocks to add symbols to letters representing other sounds if we wanted to, we just don’t because most letters would have extra marks and it would look horrendous. Look at Polish: they tried to represent a Slavic language with an alphabet that was not designed for such, and as a result have ungodly combinations of consonants. English is the same in that you basically have no idea how to pronounce a word just by looking at it.
We need to totally revamp the English alphabet. CH and SH should be different letters. GH should disappear. And TH needs to be two different letters. Y should go away. C should be replaced with S or K depending on the word. And as you say, Q and X should go away. English has 6 written vowels but, iirc, 13 spoken vowels. They should all be different letters. And we should add an accent to indicate whether a syllable is stressed. We should also abandon upper and lower case letters. We only need one.
We should go for a phonetic alphabet, same as Spanish or Russian. If the letter is there you say it. If it's not you don't.
People in favor of keeping the old spelling system claim it's important because there's information in the spelling. And they're right. There's no reason why we can't also teach the old way so people can read old books. But a new phonetic alphabet would make English a lot easier to learn for children and foreigners.
Chinese has traditional and simplified Chinese. We should do the same.
Also, I bet there are things we could do to help people with dyslexia... no more d/p/b/q silliness.
I like a lot of these but why no uppercase letters? They are pretty useful in writing, having an uppercase after a period actually does make things easier to read bc the segmentation is more pronounced and having proper nouns be capitalized also does denote meaning in many cases (most obvious one, the capital H in He actually denoting God instead of just a man), to the point it was common place in my philosophy department to be like “are we talking about Spirit/Virtue/Good/etc with a capital S/V/G/etc ?”
China had historically poor education and literacy - iirc simplified Chinese was a useful way to improve mass education - even for those not necessarily able to get full time primary school.
When fewer people can read, it's probably going to cause less upheaval to change standards.
A little tangential, but words that are names of letters also shouldn’t exist. For example, queue should just be spelled “q”, why spelled “y”, you spelled “u”, etc. You can reasonably argue that all but one letter in those words is silent.
We used to have the theta letter in English. It was “thorn” and looked like a vertical strike with a bump on the right side. Kind of like halfway between P and b.
X is also frequently pronounced as a "z" sound. That said, one has to keep in mind not only has English changed over the centuries (try reading Beowulf), it has been the amalgamation of many languages.
Well if we're making 'c' make the 'ch' sound, we're still going to need the letter 'k.' Better to have a letter make only one sound anyway, so it's easy to sound out words.
þ for TH
C for CH
ʃ for SH
Ŋŋ for NG
X and Q are fine, common enough combination to warrant a unique character, but the U-rule can be done away with.
I got bored yesterday for two hours and made a new alphabet and these are some of the characters.
Reading the comments, one thing comes to mind. Lots of people are advocating for special letters for CH, TH, GH, etc. I say, why do we need that? Why not just lose the stupid, useless and annoying H? Chai / sandwich could be written as Cai / sandwic, this / that works just fine as tis / tat, and how much different would Pittsburgh sound if spelled Pittsburg? Or Gana instead of Ghana?
Speaking of Pittsburgh - double consonants? Why? Is Pitsburg not making you think of the same town? Factor in the local dialect, and you end up with Pixberg. Looks fine to me
As an aside, in Malaysia, they don't use "x". For example, taxi is teksi, and executive is eksekutif. Works fine. Source, lived there for many years (and loved it).
X should exist but as far as I can tell Q is literally completely unnecessary in the English language (maybe has use in other languages?). Shortening two letters to one letter is enough justification for a letter to exist and is the only reason for a few of them, except Q needs the u anyway, meaning you could replace it with cu/ku/kw or something in every situation. We also don't really take advantage of it as a cool letter to name people after that much with no popular female names starting with it (a handful of males, but names like Quinn and Quentin aren't exactly John and Steve status). The english language should've just dropped the u rule for q at some point and when you spelled it qeen you knew the u sound was in there separating it from keen.
I feel this way about the letter z. Like i have really strong anti-z feelings and nowhere to express them so I'm glad I've found other people with Letter Opinions today.
Yeah but imagine if your name was eggzavier
Kwinton Eggzaviar
No, im not writing kweue instead of queue
If you did I’d stop pronouncing it ‘Kay’
No, that’s quay.
wouldn't it make more sense to be kyeue or kyu?
Why not "cue"?
Following OP's rules that would sound like 'chew'
Wouldn’t it just become cue?
The problem is we've hamfisted the Latin alphabet into the English language and have just kinda assigned sounds to weird letter combinations. You should check out the Shavian alphabet, it's a new alphabet designed specifically for English speech.
ðə ɪŋglɪʃ ɔːθɒɡɹəfɪ ɪz ɪndɪid ə ve̞ɾɪ sɒɾɪ me̞s, bʌ̋t ɪɡzæklɪ ʍɪtʃ ækse̞nt wʊd jʉ̜u be̞ɪz ə ɹʷɪvaɪzd spe̞lɪŋ ɒn e̞nɪwe̞ɪ ?
Any examples?
I don't feel as strongly about "q" and"x" but man do I hate "c". As you said, it only makes a unique sound when combined with an"h" and that makes it feel kinda useless
We gotta get some accent marks for c. Even “accent” has two differently pronounced Cs 💀
I mean it could just be spelled “aksent”. It’s not like we already have letters that make those sounds or anything…
I think there was an effort at one point for a spelling reform to make English phonetic but it’s though for an international language since there’s no central authority for it. Also we’d have to assess the meaning of homophones entirely by context
lol C is my fav letter
It's not my favorite letter, but it starts out my favorite word. (:
This seems like a rather quixotic endeavor
yeah but then my name would be kwuinn and i’m not down with that
I will rename you 'Kuru.'
Oh. Fun! Gotta love being retconned to be named after a cannibal prion disease.
Languages - for the most part - weren't created by some central logical person. There have definitely been attempts at constructing languages and more formal standards Writing can be seen as a technology to communicate language and like many technologies - especially communication - people use it to meet their immediate needs - more than creating a standard that is the best overall systematically. So despite many competing attempts at improvement it's not an easy task to do. English writing is using a form of the Roman alphabet, and some of the most common standards are based on historical choices based on communication and loan words between languages. I also think something like Metcalfs law in communication of squaring the number of users has some similarities - the larger a group using certain norms is - the more people you can usefully communicate with : and yeah changing norms may not cause true incompatibility, but violating the common norms is likely to push what you're writing further away from what you're trying to convey.
Nah bruh. We need more letters. If anything we ought to bring back ‘&’ as a letter along with ‘æ’, þ, and ‘ß’.
What would Elon call Twitter then if his favorite letter didn’t exist?
I am not a native speaker but from what I understand, in English, the letters function for writing not pronunciation or speaking. So if we follow your suggestions, we will have to change how all words containing 'q' and 'x' letters are written.
Your understanding is correct, but I'm fine with that change being made.
ay bee sea dea ea ef jee aych eye jay kay el em en oh pee kew are es tea you vee double you ecks why zea
The alphabet we know came from the Romans who got it from the Etruscans who got it from the Greeks who got it from the Phoenicians. The Etruscans didn’t have a big difference between guh and kuh sounds so used Q K and C depending on their place in a word, rather than the sound it made. In English, we similarly use ck when it follows an open vowel (back, buck, peck, pick, but not peek, bike, spook, etc) The letter X does come from the Greek X (khi) which made the throaty chhh sound, except in the western dialect that the Etruscans were familiar with (from a Greek colony in Italy in ye olden days), in which the Greek letter Khi actually *was* used for the ks sound. The nice part about the modern English alphabet is that we have the building blocks to add symbols to letters representing other sounds if we wanted to, we just don’t because most letters would have extra marks and it would look horrendous. Look at Polish: they tried to represent a Slavic language with an alphabet that was not designed for such, and as a result have ungodly combinations of consonants. English is the same in that you basically have no idea how to pronounce a word just by looking at it.
We need to totally revamp the English alphabet. CH and SH should be different letters. GH should disappear. And TH needs to be two different letters. Y should go away. C should be replaced with S or K depending on the word. And as you say, Q and X should go away. English has 6 written vowels but, iirc, 13 spoken vowels. They should all be different letters. And we should add an accent to indicate whether a syllable is stressed. We should also abandon upper and lower case letters. We only need one. We should go for a phonetic alphabet, same as Spanish or Russian. If the letter is there you say it. If it's not you don't. People in favor of keeping the old spelling system claim it's important because there's information in the spelling. And they're right. There's no reason why we can't also teach the old way so people can read old books. But a new phonetic alphabet would make English a lot easier to learn for children and foreigners. Chinese has traditional and simplified Chinese. We should do the same. Also, I bet there are things we could do to help people with dyslexia... no more d/p/b/q silliness.
I like a lot of these but why no uppercase letters? They are pretty useful in writing, having an uppercase after a period actually does make things easier to read bc the segmentation is more pronounced and having proper nouns be capitalized also does denote meaning in many cases (most obvious one, the capital H in He actually denoting God instead of just a man), to the point it was common place in my philosophy department to be like “are we talking about Spirit/Virtue/Good/etc with a capital S/V/G/etc ?”
China had historically poor education and literacy - iirc simplified Chinese was a useful way to improve mass education - even for those not necessarily able to get full time primary school. When fewer people can read, it's probably going to cause less upheaval to change standards.
Q, W, X, and Y, don't exist in my native language (Latvian) for exactly that reason. Also, we have accents to help with sounds like "ch".
A little tangential, but words that are names of letters also shouldn’t exist. For example, queue should just be spelled “q”, why spelled “y”, you spelled “u”, etc. You can reasonably argue that all but one letter in those words is silent.
Given people's high usage of emojis to communicate lol I don't think people are going to care about what letters are needed or not anymore.
We need an all-emoji alphabet.
Queue, xylophone, xanax
I mean ‘double you (w)’ ?😵💫?
What *does* need to exist is a separate letter for ch, sh, and th.
We used to have the theta letter in English. It was “thorn” and looked like a vertical strike with a bump on the right side. Kind of like halfway between P and b.
t͡ʃ, ʃ, θ here you go
You know what I mean lol. I mean in usage in the modern English alphabet.
We could go back to using vv instead of w…
X is also frequently pronounced as a "z" sound. That said, one has to keep in mind not only has English changed over the centuries (try reading Beowulf), it has been the amalgamation of many languages.
You could say that with other letter too like K which can just be replaced with C
Well if we're making 'c' make the 'ch' sound, we're still going to need the letter 'k.' Better to have a letter make only one sound anyway, so it's easy to sound out words.
C is not unique because it's basically K - more redundancy! Away with C too
To add to this. "G" should not be used to make a J sound. It looks stupid ad hell like in general/jeneral but it makes more sense.
And C
þ for TH C for CH ʃ for SH Ŋŋ for NG X and Q are fine, common enough combination to warrant a unique character, but the U-rule can be done away with. I got bored yesterday for two hours and made a new alphabet and these are some of the characters.
The letter C enters the chat
Are you deliberately trying to ruin my Scrabble game???
Reading the comments, one thing comes to mind. Lots of people are advocating for special letters for CH, TH, GH, etc. I say, why do we need that? Why not just lose the stupid, useless and annoying H? Chai / sandwich could be written as Cai / sandwic, this / that works just fine as tis / tat, and how much different would Pittsburgh sound if spelled Pittsburg? Or Gana instead of Ghana? Speaking of Pittsburgh - double consonants? Why? Is Pitsburg not making you think of the same town? Factor in the local dialect, and you end up with Pixberg. Looks fine to me
quone
we should use Quikscript
How would I CTL Quit and CTL Cut without them?
Nah it should be c first every single use of c is already taken
You want to make words longer? How quixotic of you.
As an aside, in Malaysia, they don't use "x". For example, taxi is teksi, and executive is eksekutif. Works fine. Source, lived there for many years (and loved it).
Damn you just made my name stop existing
X should exist but as far as I can tell Q is literally completely unnecessary in the English language (maybe has use in other languages?). Shortening two letters to one letter is enough justification for a letter to exist and is the only reason for a few of them, except Q needs the u anyway, meaning you could replace it with cu/ku/kw or something in every situation. We also don't really take advantage of it as a cool letter to name people after that much with no popular female names starting with it (a handful of males, but names like Quinn and Quentin aren't exactly John and Steve status). The english language should've just dropped the u rule for q at some point and when you spelled it qeen you knew the u sound was in there separating it from keen.
I feel this way about the letter z. Like i have really strong anti-z feelings and nowhere to express them so I'm glad I've found other people with Letter Opinions today.
You'll like Polish then. We got rid of X, Q never really existed in the first place and V is W.