Mario Rodríguez Peña
English speakers are used to Latin alphabet, and although English sounds would need more characters, a reform in the alphabet, although academically more correct, would be surely rejected by the most of population and it would distance English language from other important languages coded by Latin alphabet. So, this present reform will use Latin alphabet, doing its best, and without the use of diacritics, unnatural for English language. The pronunciation referred in this proposal is the Received Pronunciation (RP), because it is the nowhere standard of English. However, curiously this reform will be closer to American orthography because this is closer to pronunciation than British orthography, thanks to the Noah Webster reform. Although this proposal uses RP and it is closer to American orthography, it has correspondences to other varieties of English, for instance: 1. In this proposal, the digraph is used to represent the original /U/ sound to distinguish from the caret /V/ sound commonly represented by a single . In Hiberno-English there would not be distinction between and , both pronounced as /U/. 2. /T/ and /D/ sounds are represented by and respectively, giving that H the value to change plosive /t/ and /d/ sounds to non-sibilant fricative ones in the most of English varieties, except Hiberno-English where and are pronounced as T and D respectively. In this dialect, this "H modifier" would not have value, and even “that” is sometimes spelled as “dat”. 3. The post-vocalic R before consonant or final E is kept in this proposal regardless it is not pronounced in the standard English and most of the accents, which they are non-rhotic, because this R elongate the sound of the preceding vowel and modifies the sound of /i:/ to /I@/ and the sound of /ei/ to /e@/, as Rollings (2004) proposed, and because this letter is still pronounced in rhotic accents such as Hiberno-English. In no case, different spellings depending on t
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