@icedquinn lol English hiragana. Nice, I had no idea this existed.

@icedquinn @Amikke Every attempt to develop a phonetic alphabet for English will ultimately fail as the oft-lamented uncoupling of sound to meaning that those alphabets try to "fix" is what allows English to be interoperable between accents, dialects, and nations. Even if you were somehow able to convince English speakers to adopt one, the situation wouldn't be much better with the various splits and mergers resulting in a handful of different spellings for every word depending on the person, place, or time of day. It's an unsolvable problem for any language of scale.

@Coyote it's a solved problem for most existing languages.

@Amikke Most definitely not. For example, in Spanish "almuerzo" can be pronounced [almweɾθo] or [almweɾso] or in French "tempête" can be [tɒ̃.pɛt] or [tã.paɪ̯t]. Any language with more than a couple hundred people will probably have this problem, and any with a couple thousand is almost guaranteed to.

@Coyote accents and dialects develop over time, sure, but these are still small differences in certain words or in pronouncing the language overall, not wildly different pronunciations of the same sequences of letters depending on what sequences they're next to, where they are located within the word, what language did English take the word from, and the alignment of planets on March 15th 1386.

Neither Spanish nor French have the problem where an adult native speaker looks at how a word is written and isn't sure which one of multiple possible pronunciations to pick. It's a solved problem.

@Coyote the whole point of an alphabet since its inception, as opposed to logogram systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, is to write down phonemes so that you don't have to wonder how to write something you hear or pronounce something you read. A unification of spoken and written language. English experienced some kind of devolution where they essentially went back to words being logograms, except using latin characters as components, that for historical reasons vaguely suggest the pronunciation. Worst of both worlds.

@Coyote @Amikke shavian failed because he left money to found a school for it and the state took the money and spent it on hookers and blow instead

@icedquinn @Coyote tbh it would've probably failed anyway, the inertia of something like the alphabet is insane. Even in the case of something more immediately useful like a measurement system there's a certain English-speaking country that refuses to switch from medieval units like the rest of the world did, no chance of switching out the alphabet.

@tkk13909 love the idea, know it will never catch on. Unless computer translation reaches the level of completely seamless translation, which happens to be the same moment when international languages become pointless.

@Amikke yeah I wish it was a popular international language.

@tkk13909 same

@Amikke I've learned it and I love it a lot but "La Fina Venko" will unfortunately never be a thing :(

@Amikke
Kompreneble ĝi ĉiam havos sencon, kiam vi volas senpere paroli kun homojn.
@tkk13909

@tkk13909@fosstodon.org @Amikke@qoto.org or #Lojban

@hyolo @Amikke honestly, any standardized language would be better than English.

@tkk13909@fosstodon.org @Amikke@qoto.org Problem is, it's standardised with annoying semantics. Such as «jetnu» and other gismu having a place for "the standard by which something is true".

@hyolo @Amikke @tkk13909 Lojban's better than English here, but not perfect. The main issue is that Lojban doesn't mandate specific phonetic sounds; instead, it assigns a set of sounds to each phoneme. This is nice for -r- because it means we can use any rhotic sound but it's not good for -a- or other vowels which tend to shift with emphasis.