hypothetically, let’s say you were tasked with simplifying the English language. how would you go about doing that, and why?
to start with an easy one, the first thing I would do is eliminate silent letters from all words and make it so no letters share sounds. for example, example would become exampel. then, because x would no longer be around or at least wouldn’t have that sound, ekzampel. I would also consider eliminating mulit-letter sounds like ch, and replacing them with single characters (probably the ones that got removed).
Not all letters are silent in all varieties of English (initial wh in some words, for instance).
That sounds nice. Whose sound are you going to pick since not all are pronounced the same in all varieties of English, and how are you going to convince them to go along with it?
Wouldn’t eksampəl or ekzampəl be better? Speaking of, how would you handle things that are voiced in some contexts but not others? Would spelling differ? What about the noun present and the verb present? Would their spellings change?
The whole idea is nice on the surface, but has a ton of problems. Choosing one variety of English to be the prestige version and example is going to alienate others and probably just end up fracturing the language. I also don’t necessarily like that we’d lose the ability to figure out a word’s meanings by its parts if we know something about it from spelling (think words coming from Latin where I might be able to piece together what it means even if I’ve never seen the word itself) since the spellings would all likely change.
Ultimately, due to a number of problems, I wouldn’t change English; I should rather have people move toward a global lingua franca designed for the purpose, but all of those have their own issues as well.