Most English spelling and a huge portion of its literary etymological corpus comes from French following the Norman Invasion. Most of our spelling comes from adapting spelling prior to French norms at the time. That's why yo see so many misplaced "e"s and "y"s- which had little to no phoentic value to English-speakers at the time, say in the world "evile" (not pronounced /i:vəle:/). It was just an attempt to copy French words- a bad one, at that.
English isn't really regulated that much in comparison to say French and German is, and there's no uniform body for the English language. Most of it has been left up to the English people. I mean the closest thing we have to regulation is the Oxford English Dictionary (for the Commonwealth) or even more decentralized in the United States (Websters I believe might've been most popular- unsure now). English spelling reform regarding a phoentic transcription could've happened had any government probably supported it, but it would've been significantly more difficult after the time of Shakespeare and a damned sight near harder after the works in the Victorian Era. The Old English alphabet was a great ways at following Germanic languages at the time of being largely phoentic. It didn't however, and English has obviously always mainted that French-esque style to the language.
There were actually several later attempts at reform- but these came too late. Not that I have any linguistic authority or really like some steel-set opinion on it all, if you wanted a spelling reform that was phonetic you could probably:
- Eliminate Norman Conquest; the introduction of French as the prime language of government and "culture" in Britain made all the people who had the available resources to write English write it like they were writing French. English as it was written would've been preserved and, probably would've gone down a similar road as the other Germanic languages.
- Initiate some government program to standardize the English language; reforms like this were taken up in other centralized governments in the future. By the 1600s and 1700s words had begun to take shape and to spell them different would seem akward- like it would be now to attempt to reform English spelling to the current phoentic translations we have with regards to orthography.
I suppose a movement in say, America could've made the writing more phonetic in transcription. Most knowledge of phoentic transcription didn't actually come around until the 1600s, 1700s, and English has a plethora of vowels we don't really see as different sounds- and even several consonants [take the voiceless dental frictive /θ/, English "th" (them) and voiced dental frictive /ð/ also "th" (wrath)]. The difference in voicing is the difference between saying an "s" and "z" (vocal chords vibrate in "z").
Sorry, I know that I pulled out the IPA and might've sounded a little pompous and jerky. I'm obviously apt to be wrong and I just get so excited with linguistics >_<
English isn't really regulated that much in comparison to say French and German is, and there's no uniform body for the English language. Most of it has been left up to the English people. I mean the closest thing we have to regulation is the Oxford English Dictionary (for the Commonwealth) or even more decentralized in the United States (Websters I believe might've been most popular- unsure now). English spelling reform regarding a phoentic transcription could've happened had any government probably supported it, but it would've been significantly more difficult after the time of Shakespeare and a damned sight near harder after the works in the Victorian Era. The Old English alphabet was a great ways at following Germanic languages at the time of being largely phoentic. It didn't however, and English has obviously always mainted that French-esque style to the language.
There were actually several later attempts at reform- but these came too late. Not that I have any linguistic authority or really like some steel-set opinion on it all, if you wanted a spelling reform that was phonetic you could probably:
- Eliminate Norman Conquest; the introduction of French as the prime language of government and "culture" in Britain made all the people who had the available resources to write English write it like they were writing French. English as it was written would've been preserved and, probably would've gone down a similar road as the other Germanic languages.
- Initiate some government program to standardize the English language; reforms like this were taken up in other centralized governments in the future. By the 1600s and 1700s words had begun to take shape and to spell them different would seem akward- like it would be now to attempt to reform English spelling to the current phoentic translations we have with regards to orthography.
I suppose a movement in say, America could've made the writing more phonetic in transcription. Most knowledge of phoentic transcription didn't actually come around until the 1600s, 1700s, and English has a plethora of vowels we don't really see as different sounds- and even several consonants [take the voiceless dental frictive /θ/, English "th" (them) and voiced dental frictive /ð/ also "th" (wrath)]. The difference in voicing is the difference between saying an "s" and "z" (vocal chords vibrate in "z").
Sorry, I know that I pulled out the IPA and might've sounded a little pompous and jerky. I'm obviously apt to be wrong and I just get so excited with linguistics >_<