THE CRITIQUE OF SPL. REFORM BY FONETIC FREAKS

"Giving English a phonetic spelling system, with one symbol for each sound, would produce a range of ridiculous ill-effects, such as the following:" Compound sounds like "J" (which is phonetically "D" + "ZH") would have to be clumsily spelled out in full (so becomes «dzhey»).   Trivial phonetic distinctions, as between the two kinds of "A" in "CHAMPION'S SWAG", or of "T" in "TEA STRAINER" would require distinct spellings; and subtle dialectal vowel distinctions - as between Glaswegian and Bronx versions of "CAT" - would further confuse matters. "Do you want to?" would have to be spelt the way it's pronounced - as one word, «dzhawonnuh?»"   Gus prefers to represent words as spoken but even he recognizes the utility of word divisions.   du u want tu.  I think spelling this phrase as spoken in  NYC would be difficult for QicRyt.  All positional writing systems have some problems writing dialect.   j'w'na?

SB:  There is a difference between 100% phonetic, 100% phonemic, and more phonemic than TS.
I think that David Crystal uses a variant  of this argument in his critique of spelling reform.  English has too many dialects so a phonemic representation is impossible.

The transcription challenges mentioned above might be spelled these ways in a more phonemic notation::   
WLO: jáy, champiònz swag té stránèr     Webster; já, champiønz té stránør  ( In WLO te is also possible, ja is not since it would have to be distinguished from the other free vowel ä.)
RLS:   jei, caempiønz swæg ti streinør   note: j= /dZ/, c = /tS/, ø = ə   schwa



      JR: The correct response to this argument, overlooked surprisingly often by supposed experts, is "You nitwit!  Who said anything about a phonetic system?  All we need is one that's roughly graphemic ("one reading per grapheme") and preferably phonemic ("one spelling per phoneme") and/or morphemic  ("one spelling per morpheme")."  

Grapheme

the basic unit of orthography.  Usually in alphabet-based writing systems equivalent to a letter; however, compound graphemes made up of several parts (eg <Å, NG, Æ>) are also common and may count as separate items. (more)

Phoneme

the basic unit of phonology.  Each phoneme is not so much a particular sound as a set of sounds conventionally grouped together by a given language or dialect.  Variations within the set are disregarded; but distinctions between phonemes are used to tell words apart (eg ).  Note that it is quite possible for a single phoneme to be a "compound" of several sounds   (more)

Morpheme

the basic unit of morphology; a meaningful building-block in word-construction, either to coin new dictionary words ("derivation", eg ) or just to modify them to suit their role in the sentence ("inflection", eg ). (more)

"In such a system, 

• The compound phoneme /dZ/, which functions as a unit in the English sound system, can conveniently be spelt with the letter «J».
  
  
• Phonetic variants of /&/ or /t/ are no concern of a well-designed script; dialectal cases - especially ones as trivial as the one quoted above - are easy to handle  (see below).
  
• If the individual words are pronounced in isolation as «du, yu, wont, tu», nothing is forcing us to put the reduced versions in the dictionary (any more than we need to put glottal stops in the alphabet)."
  
• SB:  Most critics of more phonemic spelling have not figured out  that their critiques also apply to the dictionary
  pronunciation guide.  A more phonemic writing system is just a step closer to a dictionary representation.
  The features include no surplus characters, one reading per grapheme (no code overlaps but there may
  be more than one way to represent a phoneme).

JR: Word-recognition, treating words (or occasionally syllables) as arbitrary units to be memorized. This can be a useful skill once mastered, but a painful one to acquire - ask any Japanese kid. The way the current orthography forces learners to handle many common words as single arbitrary glyphs (doesn't one though? for 'dVzn@nt wVn Do) is a stumbling-block many schoolchildren never really get over. The upshot is that spelling reform might be briefly awkward for word-recognizers, but would eventually help even them - if only because it allows more hieroglyphs on a page! For children (and many, many adults), it would be a huge, immediate, and permanent improvement. Or at least, as good as permanent: the current orthodox system has already outlived its best-before date by half a millennium, so we can leave the next reform for Buck Rogers to worry about.