Thee inglish alfabet - статья на английском языке

How do you pronounce in English the word "ghoti"? Go-tea, g-hotty or jotty? Well, if "gh" is as in "rough" "o" is as in "women" "ti" is as in "station" then "ghoti" is "fish".
Of course there isn't really a word "ghoti" in English, but it does show how ridiculous English spelling is, doesn't it? Are you one of those unfortunate people who speak English very well but at once become worried when your teacher asks you to write? Don't be worried. Remember that a lot of English people have the same problem. Near my home there are at least two notices wrongly spelt and a lot of English people who are otherwise quite clever have to use dictionaries. What is wrong with this, for example: "Ould cars bourght here?" The trouble is this silly spelling of ours. As all those who read "Well read" will know, it just isn't logical.
Why isn't English spelling logical? The answer is that it isn't really spelling that is "wrong". Hundreds of years ago the English pronounced words as they spelt them. In many cases it is the pronunciation that has changed. Why not change the spelling to fit the new pronunciation? Of course we have thought of that too.
In 1843 Isaac Pitman, who invented shorthand, proposed a new alphabet of forty symbols. To make spelling fit pronunciation you need a different symbol for each sound. But you can use the same alphabet with just a few new symbols. Then leaving out silent letters like the "k". in knife, you just write the words as they sound. "Kat" for "cat", etc. This is what Pitman wanted to do.
Another idea is to use a completely different alphabet — a phonetic alphabet.
That is what George Bernard Shaw wanted. When he died he left money to pay for this, and in 1962 "Androcles and the Lion" came out in a phonetic alphabet using forty-eight symbols.
But a hundred years after Isaac Pitman the English alphabet hasn't changed. It would need a lot of money to change it. Think of all the books in schools and libraries and the printing machines. Then too there are those who really like our ridiculous spelling. There is in fact one new alphabet in use, the I. T. A. or Initial Teaching Alphabet. The idea behind this is that children learn to read more quickly without the problems of English spelling. Reading early is important because by reading we can learn about other things. In many of our schools children learn to read with this new alphabet and learn the old alphabet later.
Some teachers don't like it. They say that the children will never learn to spell "properly". Meanwhile the latest news is that the Simplified Spelling Society of Britain and the Simplified Spelling Association of the USA have put their heads together. They think that English is becoming the most important language in the world and so we need logical spelling. They hope to publish a book explaining their ideas and proposing another new alphabet of forty-four symbols. The name of the book? Wurld Inglish.
(From "Modern English" by Atkinson)