Here's a story about Americans who want to simplify the English language to match the simplicity of Spanish. In Spanish everything is written as sounded (almost) but English has a plethora of words which could be spelt any number of ways. Add to that the huge number of loan words from foreign languages which can either retain their original spelling (café from French) or take an Anglicised form (bungalow, from the Urdu 'bungla').

America has already simplified a number of English words (centre, color etc.) but a better example is Irish Gaelic. Irish was simplified from being very similar to Scots Gaelic very successfully. An example of Scots Gaelic - comhfhurtail, 'comfortable' is pronounced 'corshtal'! Silent m,h,f,h,i and an "sh" sound that isn't even written!

Would English benefit from being re-written phonetically? I would like to hear the opinion of those who speak English as a first language and those who have learnt or are currently learning it.

Thanks

And the story - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060705/.../simpl_wurdz_1

Eyv olwez thawt Inglish wuz wey 2 difficlt. Soh eym awl fer riting it the wey it sounz :lol:

I think Spanish is very hard.

Yo tambien.

In the rare situation where a dictionary is not available and I'm not able to spell a word, I make the simple choice to express myself with different terms. I don't see the problem.

The inability to spell correctly can hamper communication but it does not stop it.

Leave English how it is.

Everyone needs to learn Esperanto (http://www.tejo.org/info/pri_esperanto.php?lingvo=en).

yeah!

what's with tongue and tough and friend and sugar anyway!
i had a tough time figuring out spellings when i was a kid... but now i get really annoyed when ppl use bad diction... like a bad first impression!!

Spanish is cool as far as pronunciation, but conjugating of verbs… tricky.

In English there are plenty of words I see in print, but rarely hear used in conversation. I ALWAYS butcher those words.

I think people have already tried to simplify it. That's what slang is for. Now in the new electronic era, we have l33t communication.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

So, we can just convert to L33T or K0Nv3R7 70 1337