Readers respond: what if we changed our spellings to match the phonetics?

What would happen if we changed our spellings to match phonetics? Mikal Richerdsun, Bryton

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Hoo nose. sparklesthewonderhen

Standardization would be a headache, as people with different accents would likely adopt different spellings. For example, the word "car" could be spelled "kar", "kah", "kaw", "kyar" (and so on) depending on regional variations and preferences. Mobilepope

As I get older, I wonder what the letter C is for. K covers the hard sound while S takes care of the soft. It's the only letter we could delete from the alphabet and lose nothing. mechanical cat

Church. SailingCat11

It's true, I correct myself. Mechanicalcat

Korrekt corrected to korrekted. wildskel

English was written phonetically in centuries past. We have his legacy today in, for example, "was" - which people used to pronounce "wass", or "knight" which was pronounced something like "k-nikt". But the pronunciation changes, as in the charmingly named Great Vowel Shift. I like to see how the wonky English spelling shows word history. Janchan

Whose phonetics? South East England, Midlands, South West England, Wales (from which part?), Scotland (from which part?), Northern Ireland… the list goes on. There is no "correct" way to speak English! older brother

When I pronounced "bath" like "barth", my (northern) class asked, "How do you say "fat cat", miss? " "Obese feline." ethelfrida

Consonants wouldn't be too much of a problem, but there would be a serious problem with vowels and diphthongs. The Roman alphabet contains only five vowels; however, spoken English has 12, so you would probably need a new alphabet - modeled on the International Phonetic Alphabet - to write them. There is a similar problem with diphthongs because they often combine vowel sounds that we cannot write. A language like Spanish, which is a "say what you read" language, does not have this problem because spoken Spanish has only five vowels and three diphthongs. montesdeoca

What would happen is that children would learn to write and read much faster, freeing up time to learn other things in school . We would have much lower illiteracy rates and dyslexics would find life much easier (although still difficult). But that won't be done because there is no language authority for English, and too many people have invested too much time in learning the current system, so they place great importance on their spelling skills . Not to mention how much they would hate to be deprived of the ability to judge others based on something as silly as whether they can spell "correctly." Sepa

A new concept: introduce phonetic spelling, and illiteracy would decrease, children would learn to speak and write faster - uh. Well, we're not going to find out if there's any truth to that, because it's not going to happen. It would be colossally expensive (anyone wishing to profit from the literature of the past would have to have the works translated if they only knew the phonetic spelling) - and it would also take far more time and study than most English speakers are willing to devote to it. learn their language. wightpaint

As a dyslexic, I can say with authority that phonetics makes reading or writing nearly impossible! Accent, dialect and varying pronunciation are the bane of my life. Mybeagle

I remember in 1971 having to give my address to a policeman in Liverpool. I spelled it Drimnagh. He spelled it dramnrgh. When I corrected him, he told me to learn to speak English. I come from Dublin. Marygoal

Self-esteem of struggling writers in elementary schools would skyrocket, the quality of their writing would not be compromised by poor spelling, Sats results would improve dramatically, and the lives of young children trying to learn to spell (while learning to form letters, speak correctly, and compose great works of literary genius) would be so much simpler. Bring it on! chloewaters

It would take an awful lot of time, effort and money for very little benefit. The writing does not have to reflect the spoken language. Chinese doesn't and Arabic...