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Well, many things are clear from context and spelling could be simplified.

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.

The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

(Attributed to Mark Twain)

About Swiss and the as: I remember one funny occurrence I had while reading a Swiss paper. It took me two paragraphs in an article "Neue Busse für $company" till I understood this wasn't about busses, but a penalty fine (Buße) Both are pronounced differently and mean different things.



One of the ways in which we know how classical Latin was pronounced, is the recovered writings of a Roman scholar who seriously proposed dropping the letter 'k' as redundant and replacing it with 'c' anywhere it is used. Should give you a hint as to the actual pronunciation of "veni, vidi, vici".

EDIT: Erroneously swapped 'c' and 'k'.


> the recovered writings of a Roman scholar who seriously proposed dropping the letter 'c' as redundant and replacing it with 'k' anywhere it is used

Can you source this? It doesn't make a lot of sense -- the Latin letter C wasn't redundant, because there is no Latin letter K.


I got it from this video, which attributes it to Quintilian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_enn7NIo-S0

And I seem to have swapped 'c' and 'k'; Quintilian wished to eliminate 'k' in favor of 'c', which is probably why you think there is no Latin letter 'k'.


If you look at the qualifier Quintilian adds (the video translates it as "the letter C keeps its strength before all the vowels"), you can see why K was in use at the time -- the sound change familiar from modern Romance languages, where C "softens" to [s] or [tʃ] before front vowels, made indicating [k] before front vowels difficult.

That is an innovation to deal with language change. It is not a part of classical or old Latin. Quintilian isn't proposing dropping K because C makes it unnecessary; he's proposing retroactively not adopting K in the first place because the change that prompted people to use it is wrong.


I didn't even notice the changes in spelling until really far in. Blew my mind!




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