Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Five failed attempts to improve our useless alphabet" video.

Honestly, English spelling would be vastly improved by the simple addition of a method of indicating the location of the primary stress in the word. A substantial chunk of the confusing nature of English spelling comes from the system assuming you somehow magically already know that, and thus only disambiguates vowel readings when the stress pattern actually permits more than one reading of that character in that position. It wouldn't solve all the issues, but it would be a huge improvement.
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Indeed. The spelling system/alphabet Does have room for improvement, but any attempt to make it more phonetic will promptly trip over the rather extreme variety of dialects which use it. Even just the USA has enough to cause issues, never mind Britain.
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@mymo_in_Bb Scrapping C entirely is a bad idea indeed, yes. But there's a solid argument for using it only where we currently use ch, and then actually writing z rather than s where z is meant and s rather than c when s is meant. Whether it's actually worth the effort or not is a different story, of course. As for G... well, it's worse and more easily solved, as half the time it's g as it shoudl be, and the other half it is j... though I'm sure this would then occasionally cause ambiguity with j, given it is sometimes read as y... quite a bit less though (mostly in foreign words that have resisted anglicisation for lack of common use). Q is an interesting one. It actually makes a different sound from k... but that there is no k/q minimal pair in English (save for foreign proper nouns). English speakers mostly can't actually pronounce a k sound in the places where we write q... but also can't pronunce a q sound in the places where we write k (again, mostly)... but also mostly can't tell the difference between the two sounds (which have different IPA characters, mind you), and don't enounciate the distinction particularly well. Which is to say there's a perfectly reasonable argument regarding why Q is there... but also an argument at least as solid that it's existence is pointless and we should get rid of it. As always, the main issue is less the change itself, and more that the prople proposing it don't know about and/or understand the knock on effects and have thus put no effort into handling the consequences there-of. (sort of like the various ideologically corrupted twits who keep insisting on trying to force changes to how others speak in the (incorrect) belief that it will somehow advance the cause of their ideology... but can't be arsed to understand how the language actually works Before their change and consequently just cause problems for everyone that mostly serve to create opposition to their goals where none previously existed).
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Indeed. Still better than 'proper' cursive writing though.
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except, of course, the moment you run start applying it to different dialects and accents and suddenly a bunch of the charactgers either have two readings or overlap again.
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There used to be a limited number of "standard" dialects, facilitating communication between those who spoke different dialects much like one learns English now, or French back in the day, in order to be able to communicate with as many other people a possible without learning every language under the sun. Somewhere along the way this was deemed discriminatory and ideologically unacceptable, as was tossed, depriving many of a useful skill and making it more difficult for them to communicate with others, with all the problems that brings.
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Well, that's one way to show the extent of your ignorance of history, I suppose.
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No, English spelling does have some issues that do need straightening out. The problem is that most people's assumptions as to what those issues are are incorrect and have more to do with the quality of teaching they recieved on the subject than they do with the actual system itself (grammar is even worse in this regard, mind you). For example: Many rules of English spelling regarding how one is to read (and consequently write) vowels presuppose that the reader already knows the stress pattern of the word, thus only disambiguating the reading of the vowel if the stress pattern actually permits more than one reading. Which runs into the problem of the English language having such a large vocabulary that you're inevitably going to encounter words you have never heard someone else say, and thus have no idea of the correct stress pattern for. An astonishingly large amount of the seeming 'inconsistency' in English spelling just straight up Vanishes if the primary stress(es), and thus the stress pattern, are Actually Marked. Also, there is really no justification for the persistence of -ough beyond 'we've not yet figured out a way to get everyone to agree to a change it'.
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@HotelPapa100 i don't have a problem with silent letters in general, though in practice English's use of them could use a little tidying up here and there if one was bothering with reforms to begin with.
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There's definitely room for improvement, but the first step to achieving such is tossing out the notion that making the alphabet 'more phonetic' is a useful goal rather than an occasional, and temporary, happy accident. The second is probably actually including any indicator at all of stress patterns (given that the existing system rather bafflingly assumes you already know them, and becomes more consistent when you do).
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Webster didn't simplify spelling. He made it more complicated by breaking the patterns that made the existing systems consistent, making it More Complicated. And it would have been bad enough if his changes had stuck properly, but instead adoption was erratic, making the problem worse. And, of course, his changes were more about nationalism and being not-British, Also complicating English spelling by spliting American English away from the standard that was, and would be, used by the rest of the English speaking world... which was a problem at the time and became an absolute Mess when the USA started significantly influencing the world outside North America and started spreading their system to other places (Coming to a head with the invention of spell-check).
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Spelling changes, in any useful and consistent manner, don't either. That's half of why Websters attempts at reform made things worse rather than better. In English at least.
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Ayup. There's definitely room for improvement, but the first thing that needs to be done is tossing out the notion that making it 'more phonetic', is actually meaningfully achievable without irreperably fragmenting the language.
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