As I teach my child to read, I am daily struck by the idiosyncrasies of English spelling. Phonetic languages are much easier; a Turkish man told me that children generally learn to read in about 3 weeks in Turkey. I read about a new move to allow domain names using nonRoman alphabets. I propose that now is the time to phoneticize all languages, using a common alphabet. The Internet and possibly Google can serve the role which previously required an absolute dictator.
Pieces of this exist on the half bakery, linked: "low end speech recognition" and "Universal Alphabet". Low end speech recognition should be able to translate anything spoken into the phonetic alphabet and so subtitle visual media. Internet pages (the place to stand) could have a switch in which a page in a given language could be displayed in the same language, phonetically as is already done with translation software (this is the lever). Eventually, people could speak any language they could read (kind of) and read any language they could speak. The productivity gains would be incalculable.
There is the matter of God, but He has Mellowed since he became a Daddy and so might not tip over the tower of Babel from pure spite.-- bungston, Nov 02 2009 Low end speech recognition low-end_20speech_20recognitionMuch more valuable with all phonetic languages. [bungston, Nov 02 2009] Universal alphabet Universal_20AlphabetUse one of these. [bungston, Nov 02 2009] Hou tu pranownse Inglish http://www.zompist.com/spell.htmlHow English spelling works, sort of.. [prufrax, Nov 03 2009] Yingzi http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htmIf English were written like Chinese... [prufrax, Nov 03 2009] Sp. "Funneticize"-- MaxwellBuchanan, Nov 02 2009 since it's 'fonetik', wouldn't it be 'fonetikize'? (Instead of 'fonetisize'...)-- neutrinos_shadow, Nov 02 2009 The common alphabet would probably end up being Latin based and most everything Asian would be up číт ĸrēĸ. Would we read left to right, right to left, or up to down? There would have to be no less than 50-60 letters due to all the diacritical marks and odd sounds (including Russo-Germanic coughing).
P.S. That lingual text I put in doesn't appear to work. Apparently the HB is not yet UA compliant.-- bdag, Nov 02 2009 Surely fernettis-eyes is better?-- pocmloc, Nov 02 2009 Turkish can indeed be learned in 3-9 weeks by a 1st grader. But what works for Turkish will not necessarily work for languages like Chinese or Japanese in which the (complex) writing system helps disambiguate the meanings of similar sounding words.
English would probably get away with a 'fonetik alfabet' if there weren't so many ingrained English speakers spread so far and wide...-- cowtamer, Nov 03 2009 random, halfbakery