Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "This ruined English spelling" video.

Unfortunately, English requires basically twice as many characters as it has, mostly vowels, if you want it's spelling to be both consistent and not horribly complex. Though a couple of accent markers (indicating primary stress and disambiguating digraphs vs syllable break between two monogaphs) would go a long way towards sorting out a lot of it. There's no saving the '-ough' cluster though.
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Oddly enough, the Most frequently used words are actually the most Resistant to pronunciation change, followed by those that get barely any use at all.
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English's Spelling is acutally right next to Japanese (and thus very close to the top, but not quite as close as you might think due to some less well known writting systems that are arguably just straight up abominations against man and god... I'm mostly joking, but only mostly) in terms of being overly complicated and something of a nightmare to learn. English Grammar? English Pronunciation? no worse than any other language. Every langauge has it's straight forward bits and it's complicated bits, and how difficult they are to learn depends on how much they diverge from what you already know. But English spelling (or, more technically, orthography)? It's got about half as many characters as it needs, is missing two rather critical diacritics it really should have (one of which it DID have prior to typewriters becoming common), and is really just generally a mess. Most of the problems being vowel related.
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it's also still nonsense. English has rules that prevent 'fish' from being a valid reading, and if you toss those out then ' ' is also a valid reading of the character string!
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Ehh, it comes closer to being phonetic than it does to qualifying for any of the Other types... But it's more like it has the fossilised remains of a phonetic writing system.
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well, there are certainly people who pronounce it as 'ahmind'
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It's also utter nonsense. 'Ghoti' can only be read 'goaty', not 'fish' because English does actually care where in the syllable a given character appears when determining what sounds it can and cannot make. If you ignore the rules that prevent Ghoti from being pronounced as fish, it can also be read as , with every character being silent. English is nothing like as chaotic and nonsensical as a lot of people try to claim. It is unreasonably and unhelpfully complex, which may well warrent some reform in its own right (marking stress, maybe introducing some more characters so we can do away with the more problematic digraphs...), but it's Actually unjustifiably nonsensical bits aren't meaningfully more numerous than is the norm among the languages of the world.
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They're 'ov' and 'of' but english spelling for some reason has a pathological aversion to ending words in 'v'. You get a lot of silent 'e' in places where it doesn't look like it should be, doing Nothing, because written words Can't end in v so have to have something after it, never mind that there are plenty of words that, as Pronunced, absolutely do end in v. This nonsense goes so far as to cause a single v to be treated as a double consonant (at least some of the time, not sure if it's entirely consistent) when determining how vowels around it interact, though to be fair that might also be because to this day it's very hard to tell vv from w in handwriting and many typefaces. (meanwhile, the digraph 'th' is often treated as a single consonant in similar situations). Though why it came out as 'of' and 'off' rather than 'ove' and 'of', I couldn't tell you. (mind you, the seperation of w, u, and v into their own characters is a lot more recent than you might think (honestly, it's recent enough to make me question how the heck anyone managed without it for so long), which may also have contributed.)
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Not no one, but dialects where it's the norm are definitely less common than those where it isn't (or, well, in my experience, much of which is probably out of date by this point).
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except that chairs, or at least stools and benches, had been around for a VERY long time before that. And the amount of people who spent most of their time sitting around wouldn't change overly much until after the great vowel shift had ended.
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well, if it's any consolation, that would disambiguate it from the rather common running together of 'so often' into 'soffen'.
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... you mean like English? ... the number of people who seem utterly baffled by the idea that 'overlook' and 'look over' (never mind 'over look') mean different things ... Though not grasping the fact that it all flips around when you change what part of speech you're dealing with is fair enough.
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Unlike the consonant chart, the IPA vowel chart is not a set of 'all the sounds that exist', but rather a set of cardinal sounds, which is to say, reference points. Any point on the vowel chart can be used in a given language or dialect, and generally one would use the IPA symbol closest to it that wouldn't be better used to represent a different sound in the same language/dialect, to my understanding. And, of course, diphthongs aren't points on that chart, but rather lines/transitions between those points.
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Which subset of them are you talking about, and what dialect do You speak? Because I don't think I've ever heard an American pronounce 'soldier' in a way that sounds like 'sodder' to me. ... of course, most people I hear, myself included, sound more like they're saying sol-(some ambiguous syllable starting with a j)
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Doesn't help that the alphabet used by English doesn't fit it at all. It needs about twice as many characters, most of them vowels, for it to be entirely consistent in it's spelling. The latin alphabet doesn't really have enough vowels for any of the germanic languages, mind you, but the others use diacriticc marks to bridge the gap, while English went all in on digraphs (though prior to the invention of the typewriter we Did have a diacritic mark indicating the difference between the oo in 'coop' and the one in 'cooperate', and similar situations). Just bringing that back and actually marking the primary stress in a word would make English spelling a lot less confusing, at least in so far as there would be less possible readings for any given character combination.
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to be fair, the spelling's a bit rough too. Side effect of only having half the characters necessary to do it right and not including rather important diacritics.
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