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The English spelling system in half a page Do you know the Engish spelling system? Not many people do

A dictionary of at least 40,000 words is needed to set out the complete English spelling system as it is at present. No other major alphabetic spelling system is as bad as that.

This is because the English language has around 44 sounds,
but only 26 roman letters, A-Z.
And these 26 letters are used to represent the 44 sounds in more than 650 different ways .

However, there is a basic spelling system underlying all the accumulated mess.
And it is not too bad - it only needs cleaning up.

25 Consonants: b d f g h j k l m n p r s t v w y z plus ch, sh, wh, ng and th/th as in think this
There are no letters really for zh as in measure vision

19 Vowels: a e i o u, a-e e-e i-e o-e u-e, ar er air or/aw, ow oy oo
There are no basic letters for oo as in book, or for the unclear sound when a vowel is not stressed, as in int' rpr' t alph'bet,. This sound is sometimes called schwa, and written ¶ upside-down e

The 318 different spellings for the 19 vowel sounds could be reduced to the 40 most consistent vowel spellings without chanjing the usual appearance of print too much, but making it much easier to lern to read and write - e.g.

Table of the basic English Vowel Spellings

a e i o u	pat	pet	pit	pot	nut
Ending a word			pity
A E I O U	mate - bait	mete - meat - meet	mite - might- typing	mote - moat	mute
Ending a word	may	me - bee	hi - my	no	emu
ar er air or/aw	cart - banana	fern - burn	fair	taut - fork
Ending a word	banana	her	air	saw - or
ow oy oo OO	shout	boil	boot	book - put
Ending a word	cow	boy	tabu - too

This basic system stil ncludes the 'majic e' as a silent letr to show a long vowel.
Hat is not the same as hate.
Minut would not be the same as minute.
This convention keeps togethr the look of word families like bit/bite/bitn/biter which all hav the same stem bit.

Consonants can be dubld to show a short vowel befor them. So comma is not the same as coma.

See how close to a sensibl English speling reform u can get. Explore. If u kept the spelings of 30 very comn 'sight' words like what who to use of off once one could should would, how hard would a sensibl English spelng be for u to read, and how much less dificult to spel? How much faster could it be lernd? What ar th chanjes u would like to make?