Phases of spelling transition

Changing the whole spelling system would be too dramatic, because English is used globally by more than 1.5 billion people, and spoken as a native or primary language by around 400 million. The amount of materials written in English is mind-boggling, from books to signage, menus to research papers, documentation to academic journals, and the swathe of human knowledge.

To solve this, we can divide the spelling system reformation into multiple steps of gradual transition.

Each of these transitionary steps may happen separately or in combination. Some steps would help ease transition over a few years (or even a couple of generations); other steps would better simultaneously.

Oxford 3000 and Oxford 5000

You can view the Oxford 3000 and Oxford 5000 word lists as spreadsheets, here (column I, NewEng L4).

The Steps

1. Mark stress.

   1. This should have been done centuries ago.

   2. changes → chánges

2. Letter conversion.

   1. Changing digraphs for new monographs (consonants and vowels).

   2. Retaining spelling system (Magic E, duplicated letters, suffixes etc).

   3. Update consonant copes and deficiencies (finger → fiŋger).

   4. chánges → чánges

3. Consonant diacritics.

   1. Keeps the spelling as similar as possible.

   2. Update consonant copes (e.g. guild → g̊ild or g̊u̇ld).

   3. чánges → чánǧes̈

4. Phonetic consonants.

   1. Replace consonants with more-phonetic consonants, but only the most common ones, so that people can easily learn the common letter mutations.

   2. чánǧes̈ → чánjez

5. Vowel Reformation.

   1. Replace Magic E spellings with macron diacritic. Retain additional vowels if they don't break the Magic E diphthong, for visual differentiation.

   2. Mark vowel mutations and reductions with appropriate diacritics, systematic if possible.

   3. Vowel reformation: Replace nonsense vowels with accurate vowels, especially diphthongs (like ou for /aw/) and digraphs (like au for /oː/).

   4. Update consonant copes, e.g. duplicate letters (dinner → díner).

   5. чánjez → чā́njėz