alt Hacker NewsAs a non native speaker, I would highly value a spelling reform to enforce sound encoding.
Pronouncing never heard before words is practically impossible today. Sure it's irrelevant for native speakers, but it's excluding non native speakers the same way kanjis are excluding non native readers who didn't spent decades of their youth learning Japanese.
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For many years now, any non-native speaker of English can use a site like Forvo to hear the pronunciation of a word just as this English speaker uses it for other languages with such uncertainties.
As a non-native speaker, I’d be happy if we all could just adopt an easy neutral language for international communication and leave hurdles of the various national languages to their native speakers. Probably not happening, but one can dream.
> Pronouncing never heard before words is practically impossible today.
Pronunciation rules do exist. They're not perfect but if you know them you'll get the right pronunciation most of the time. The problem seems to be that they're rarely taught and usually just absorbed through exposure. Most people aren't even aware of them and just do it automatically because of that.
For example, a common gotcha word is "'ghoti is pronounced 'fish'" - except it's not. Ask a native speaker and it's nearly guaranteed they'll say something like "go-tee" or "go-tie", because to get the "fish" pronunciation you have to break multiple English pronunciation rules: The "f" sound for "gh" never occurs at the start of a word, and the "sh" sound for "ti" requires a vowel after it. The "h" also prevents the "g" from being pronounced like a "j" when it starts the word. I can't remember if there was a rule violation for the "o".
Here's someone's attempt at organizing and formalizing them: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html