In a previous post, I discussed how we should read in the near future, with an electronic Reader that allowed searching and access to all texts. One particular service by the Reader that it is reasonable to expect is to provide the text in the spelling system you want to use. Of course, each spelling system would have to be implemented by someone or some organization.

This is already known to be possible, since there is software that will read printed text to you. Software that vocalizes has to identify how each word is pronounced. If that can be done it should be reasonable to hope to have software that implements some alternative spelling system.

As I mentioned in my post on automatic spelling reform, this vocalizing software is pretty good: For example, the English reader in Excel reads “I have read [pronounced “red”] the book” and “I will read [“reed”] the book” correctly. The software can never be perfect (people can’t read every text completely correctly), but it is already good enough.

Imagine you could push a button and get:

a. The text, in any language, printed in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
b. Russian text printed with accents added.
c. Latin text with long marks added.
d. French text printed with dots under silent letters.
e. English text printed in American spelling, or in British spelling.
f. English text printed using your favorite spelling reform.
g. Mandarin in either standard characters or simplified characters.
h. Mandarin in some phonetic transcription that shows tones. (This is likely to be much harder to carry out than the previous tasks. Maybe it can’t be done satisfactorily.)

One type of reform for English would be text printed with the standard spelling but with diacritic marks added to indicate the pronunciation. This would keep the standard spelling in front of someone learning English but would clue her in on how to pronounce it as well. Here is an example I cooked up:

This is just a demonstration of what ought to be possible. Some features of this particular system:

a. Dot under a letter indicates it is silent.
b. Dot over a vowel indicates it is schwa.
c. Long and short vowels indicated by usual American dictionary symbols.
d. Other common vowel pronunciations indicated by diacritics.
e. Rare pronunciations, as in “to” and “of”, indicated by a small letter written above.
f. Each consonant has zero or one pronunciation that is unmarked.
g. All pronunciations are marked for vowels.

None of these choices may be ideal. I made choices that I hope require as little memorization as possible. For example, the reader need not memorize the rules for the two pronunciations of the past ending –ed or the plural ending –s. The example above does not indicate stress, but that should be done too.

Note that this system is not meant to be written or typed by anyone. It will be created by a computer program running on text in ordinary English spelling.

To provide all this would provide lots of coding and each specific ability might have to be purchased separately, although it seems to me that it would be in the interest of a country trying to promote its language to provide appropriate software free.