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English is weird
Cornelius:
At least the northern French dialects do it logically, with septante, octante, nonante, rather than soixante-dix, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt-dix. Four score and ten?
Switching to Cyrillic is a nice idea, but English has the problem of the th-sound, which I don't believe is in there. But it could be more phonetic, like Вустер for Worcester.
cesium133:
English used to have letters for the sounds represented by 'th' (there are two sounds, one voiced and one voiceless; compare 'thin' and 'this'). The letters were thorn (Þþ) and eth (Ðð). They're still present in Icelandic, though they've fallen out of use in English.
Cornelius:
And the evolution and eventual decay of that letter led to the stereotypical Ye olde Englisshe.
cesium133:
A very old comic about a German attempting to pronounce 'th'. It's on the Wikipedia article about 'th'.
N.N. Marf:
--- Quote from: Cornelius on 18 Nov 2020, 00:17 ---Switching to Cyrillic is a nice idea, but English has the problem of the th-sound, which I don't believe is in there. But it could be more phonetic, like Вустер for Worcester.
--- End quote ---
I thought it'd be ``вустр.'' Russian orthography has some oddities. Whether a consonant is hard or soft depends on whether the following vowel is hard or soft.. except for ш, which is softened by a tail, and always uses soft vowels. It's really stupid, so a few writers are insisting on using only ш, inheriting the hardness or softness from the following vowel, like all other consonant characters do. Fewer writers would do away with the `soft sign,' and give every consonant a tailed version for softening. I think a good compromise would be to do both: add tails to consonants to soften, or the soft sign, or use soft vowels. Sure, it'll add more letters, but it'd simplify it generally: learn the base letters, and two simple ways to soften any letter (no, not a clickbait article title.. yet)
One problem with simply transcribing english cyrillicly, is that certain words are quite tight in our present orthography, but would be diluted in cyrillic. Consider, for example, the word ``I.'' Ай доунт кноу (unsurprisingly, this is how many russians, I've heard, pronounce `kn' words---it's a beautiful thing about english, that the words are spelled exactly how they sound.. -ed a long, long time ago---they're not wrong, you see: they're just insisting on the correct™ pronunciation) хау юл риакт ту ѳыс (compare Theodore Michaelovich Dostoevsky) сэнтэнс. But, as you see, ``you'' 'd be much tighter---which may affect the comparison of those two referents.
I think a more sophisticated reform could be much better, perhaps inspired by cyrrilic, involving whatever of the many wonderful letters the world has to offer. And I'd overhaul the grammar, too. And the vocabulary.. wait, now that's just inventing an idiotic dialect, or ``idiolect'' for short.
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