English is a major component of the world abstract infrastructure, but it is broken. Suggest and auto correct could fix it over time. The major fix would be to map spelling and pronunciation more closely to lower friction in learning and communication.

Some people might say, “Why argue with success?” English has become the language of choice for science, politics, and international trade. Maybe we should leave it alone? However, this is the kind of complacent attitude that usually precedes a defeat.

2018-08-14:

English is a marvelously and maddeningly inconsistent language. The words “rough”, “though”, “thought”, and “through” all contain “ough” but pronounced in a different way. In this video, Aaron Alon gradually normalizes the vowel sounds in his speech down to 1 sound per letter. The end result sounds a little like Werner Herzog doing an impression of someone from Wales doing an impression of an Italian who doesn’t speak English that well. Which makes sense because that’s pretty much how the language came together in the first place!

2018-12-05:

amongst the modern languages, English has the worst orthography, the worst mapping between spelling and sounds of any of the existing languages. And it’s a tragedy because English is becoming the universal second language.If there were a way to do in English what they’ve done in other languages, which is to clean up the orthography, that could make a huge difference in the variation associated with whether or not people can learn to read English.

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