alphabetically speaking

alphabetically speaking

Now that I'm beginning to teach the rudiments of reading--letters and phonemes--to my daughter, I'm realizing more and more what a truly perplexing language English is.

For starters, I think that simplifying our alphabet would be a good start in making it easier to learn. A number of letters could feasibly be eliminated altogether.

One could easily argue that the letters Q and X are not needed. Other letter combinations make the same sounds. While "quick" might look more elegant (meaning, more Latinate), advertisers know that everyone understands "kwik"
well enough. Despite the X-ie moniker on this blog, I would not be sorry to become Lone Zylophone who eschews zenophobes. And what an honor for the fine German Eck family if hospitals everywhere touted their Eck's-ray machines!

Take the "k" sound. Do we really need 2 letters, C and K, to play this function? I think we could happily give up one of the two. My preference would be to eliminate K, because C is useful in consonant combinations like CH that K cannot really approximate. While we're keeping C, let's eliminate its S-like properties and let S carry its own load for a change.

The question is whether the language is ready for cwic changes and ecstreme new ways of spelling. Before the advent of dictionaries (thanks cousin Noah), English was one of the most flexible languages, adept at incorporating any new words it encountered. Unfortunately, it has never looked back to reevaluate how to enable its most ancient components to live harmoniously with new additions. Thus, we have some incredibly weird spellings hanging around. We've got Viking words like knight and knife, but no longer pronounce the initial K. Could the spelling not better reflect contemporary pronunciation? Latinate and Germanic dialects have been forced to intermarry, with no thought to making them a new family with consistent spelling rules.

As 1337 begins making inroads into our language, it seems high time that linguists start working on a simplification scheme for our excesively complex tongue.