Written English

Despite being the most widely spoken language on Earth (though Mandarin has far more native speakers), English is very poorly constructed. Sentence structure and verb conjugation aside, we can critique the very phonetic system that written English uses. Between phonetic degeneracies and pronunciations imported from other languages (eg. pizza, ballet, school), it is not at all obvious from the spelling how many words in the English language pronounced. Since the purpose of written language is to record the oral tradition this is an obvious problem.

The problem is historical, of course; English was built over the course of centuries and through the merging of cultures. Significant efforts have historically been made to standardize it and have, to various extents, been successful. But, unlike ever before in history, the majority of all written English right now is screened by computers. Emails and internet content of course never make it to print, but even books and newspapers are arranged digitally. The standard spell-check dictionary means that an imposition of phonetic changes to English would be much less technically difficult - and much less painful - than it has been in the past.

If we assume (semi-reasonably) that the ubiquity of automated typesetting would handle implementation, we can simply outline the changes that would need to be made.

Sometimes in English it's just the case that the wrong letter is used in a word. For example, there's no need to have PH or GH make a sound like an F; we have the letter F! Similarly, G is used as in GORGE or GROAN, leaving J perfectly suited for words like JILL and GEORGE. The letters S and Z see this problem as well, though perhaps due to their similar sounds and our lazy pronunciation. Z is pronounced as in OOZE, ZEST, and TOPAZ. S is as in SLEEP, SONG, and OATS. Though CHARLES is spelled with an S, it's obviously pronounced with a Z.

Silent letters are almost a non-issue. Since they aren't pronounced, nobody should even notice if they're removed; note that THROUGH is already often abbreviated THRU. This could also be done for some vowels, usually E. Removing the E from the end of a word like DONE necessitates a root change (to DUN) but in some cases the letter is just outright skipped; note that CHARLES is universally pronounced CHARLZ.

The next two issues go hand in hand. Some consonants are redundant, and some sounds don't have letters.

The letters K and S are unambiguous (ignoring for a moment the existence of digrams like SH). And between the two of them they obsolete the letter C (which is sometimes a K and sometimes an S) and the letter X (which is always pronounced KS). We also see that Q is redundant with K, perhaps having QU replaced by KW or KOO.

(English has several consonants - Y and W - which defy their definition. In the middle of a word, Y produces a sound that could just as easily be attributed to I; see for examples OYSTER and ACRYLIC. At the end of a word it's perhaps EE or IE, depending on the word, but certainly some vowel sound or diphthong. W, on the other hand, is always a short OO. Whether that's deserving of its own is a topic for discussion by someone better versed in vowel architectures than I am.)

Looking at the consonants we can see that we've freed up, at least, C, X, and Y. And we have without letters the digrams CH, SH, and TH. The obvious solution is to use the character Y to mean TH, the character X to mean CH, and the character C to mean SH.

So rather than CHARLES, we would write my name XARLZ. It has one vowel, appropriate for a word with one syllable, and each letter represents a unique consonant sound.

When we move on from consonants to vowels, the whole issue becomes much more complicated. Phonetically English has at least a dozen vowel sounds, and of course we have only five characters for them. In Spanish this is solved by the extensive use of diphthongs while in Hungarian the use of dots, accents, umlauts, and double accents is used to cheat them up to fourteen vowel characters. As a result neither language has the vowel ambiguity we see in English. It's not obvious which, if either, of these two is best but they do offer a proof of concept that vowels can be done in a consistent way.

Beyond that we reach the topic of capital letters. They serve no real purpose. Capital letters are used to begin sentences, titles, and proper nouns. However, sentences and titles are denoted using punctuation and style as well. And a proper noun is clear from context in all but the most obscure situations. When reading, the meaning of a word is clear whether not it's capitalized.

On the other hand the concept of capitalization adds a whole dimension of arbitrary rules to writing. Is "Pokemon" supposed to be capitalized? How about "god"? In what cases do you capitalize the second part of a hyphenated word in a title? Should "French fries" and "Brussels sprouts" be capitalized? Each of these questions has a correct answer (though it may depend on context or who you ask) yet none of them add any any information to the text.