@AnWulf - On the pronunciation of vowels, Standard British English has 20 sounds: 12 monophthongs and 8 diphthongs.

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/p/sounds-ipa.html

Perhaps I should point out that British EFL teaching materials make extensive use of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), especially at lower levels, although not always by all teachers (although it doesn't take long to learn).

Low level course books will nearly always include an IPA phonetic chart, and at low levels new words will be introduced together with their IPA symbols. Learner's dictionaries, indeed nearly all British dictionaries use IPA to show pronunciation, and good online dictionaries (for example Oxford Advanced Learner's) have sound files for both British and American English.

At the moment British and American written English are pretty well mutually intelligible, but if we 'go phonemic' we are likely to lose that. I bought a Spanish pronunciation tape once, and in the introduction it said "A - like O in dog". I thought there was a misprint till I discovered it was an American cassette. BrE /dɒɡ/, AmE /dɔːɡ /.

Or take bath - /bɑːθ / in Standard (Southern and Scottish) British English, but /bæθ/ in American English and Northern England.

Are we going to have two or more phonemic spelling systems?

How do you deal with soft and and hard S in 3rd person singular, possessives and plurals - at the moment they have grammatical consistency, but if they were shown phonetically, you'd lose this - the same with preterite -ed endings, which have three possible pronunciations- does phonetics outweigh grammar?

And if new readers can only read things like 'hav' and 'enuff'', won't the huge canon of English literature of the Modern English period simply become like reading Chaucer? Phonetics is only one part of language: native speakers of English have to learn far less word forms than in other languages, we hardly have any cases or verb conjugation to worry about, and we don't have gender. So one thing probably balances out another.

Arguments like that, together with other arguments that have been gone over previously in these pages, together with continued public resistance by the majority of native speakers (including me, obviously), make spelling reform very unlikely, whether we like it or not.

Personally I'd prefer to concentrate on the real world we live in and on giving students (foreign, or native-speaker for that matter) the tools to master existing conventions, than to waste my time worrying about something over which I have absolutely no control, and is unlikely to change.

On my own blog, I have pronunciation games using IPA (and pronunciation poems) and an IPA keyboard for people to learn how to use IPA symbols.

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2012/09/pronunciation-game-using-ipa-symbols.html

@AnWulf - 'every study that I'v seen shows that English speaking lands hav higher illiteracy rates and that nativ English speaking students are often behind their counterparts from other more fonetically written tungs'

There is certainly research that shows that native English-speaking children learn to read and write more slowly than their counterparts in other countries, but it doesn't seem to have much effect on overall literacy rates.

According to the CIA Factbook, via Wikipedia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand have a literacy rate of 99%, on a par with major European countries: France, Belgium, Italy and Hungary are all on 99%. The US and Australia come in a bit lower, at 96.9% and 96%. Apart form one or two rare cases, the only countries that are consistently above English-speaking countries are those of the ex-Soviet block.

Austria, where, according to one of those surveys, children learn to read and write faster than in Britain, turns out to have a lower overall literacy rate, at 98%.

Phonetically spelt Spanish doesn't come out so well. In Spain the literacy rate is only 97.7, although Argentina manages 97.9.

Although, to be honest, literacy rates probably have much more to do with education levels than the nature of the native language.

Secondly, English is the most successful second language ever, with native speakers outnumbered three to one. A hell of a lot of people are successfully managing to learn English to communicate to other non-native speakers, as I can hear on the streets every day. If spelling is a problem, it doesn't seem to be stopping people learning English. I tried googling 'problems foreign learners have with English' and spelling hardly seems to feature at all.

In any case, this is all academic: spelling reform ain't gonna happen any time soon, so we have to teach in the real world, which for me is mainly that of British spelling conventions. Of course, our students can use American spelling if they want to, as long as they're consistent.

I've no objection to people campaigning for spelling reform, but that isn't going to help my students one jot. Much more constructive is to think ways of explaining to students how spelling and pronunciation work, laugh with them at the inconsistencies, and encourage them to persevere. And use pronunciation poems, for example. Which most EFL materials do.

From my experience as an EFL teacher I would say that English spelling is much more of a problem for young native speakers than for foreign learners - the fact that the latter usually have rather a better grasp of English grammar also helps: you won't find foreign learners making mistakes like 'could of' or confusing 'their', 'there' and 'they're', which apparently happens with native speakers.

@jayles - do you teach people to count by giving them a calculator? I'm sorry, but spellcheckers should be used as a final check, not as a way to teach people how to spell. In any case, a lot of people are typing directly onto the Internet nowadays, rather than using a word processing program. Browser spellcheckers often seem to be stuck in American English, so I largely ignore mine.

In fact English, despite the exceptions, has some quite clear spelling rules, and where appropriate these should be explained to students. English spelling is not impossible! If I learnt it, and you learnt it - although with AnWulf it's sometimes difficult to tell :) - so can others.

That started off a bit shakily - I should have said that speaking, listening and reading (conversations and very short texts) are totally integrated, so that students see, hear and repeat new words at the same time.

Actually I probably exaggerated a bit about beginners and oral learning a bit - but even teaching beginners using a course book, speaking, listening are totally integrated (there is less emphasis on writing at this stage) and I can't remember students having problems speaking because they didn't know how to pronounce a word. Shyness, yes, problems with grammar, yes. But admittedly my students are all adults, and if they don't know, they ask.

However I think your experience is mainly with Spanish speakers, and they seem to have particular problems with English (perhaps because they basically only have one sound for each vowel). In Europe, Spain is probably the most developed English language 'market', (it's nearly always Number 1 on the list of visitors to my EFL blog) yet in this year's English First Proficiency Ratings, it comes in at only 23. Meanwhile, Poland, where English teaching in schools really only started with the fall of communism, has pulled itself up to Number 9. It's also notable that Latin American countries come in rather low in the list, so as I said, it could be that Spanish speakers have particular problems, and perhaps especially with pronunciation. On the other hand, Spanish has both articles and a present perfect / past simple distinction, so grammar may be less problematic for them than for Poles, who have neither of these in their own language.

http://www.ef.co.uk/epi/

@AnWulf - as for foreign students, I can only speak for my twelve years or so teaching full-time in Poland. In my experience, grammar poses far more problems than spelling, especially the sort of grammar native speakers don't even think about, like tenses, articles and phrasal verbs. In fact professional translators here still make some of these fundamental grammar mistakes, yet you will rarely see them making a spelling mistake.

You say that students won't say the words because they don't know how to pronounce them. I don't quite understand this, as we teach orally as much as from texts, especially at beginner level. Students are likely to hear words well before they read them in a text. On my teaching course we had beginners classes in Greek which were totally oral (and totally in L2) in the beginning - we didn't see the words printed until well after we had learnt them.

So I guess we'll just have to agree to differ on that one.

As for archaeology, on checking I find that my dictionary does indeed give it without a diphthong in British English - /ɑːkiˈɒlədʒi/ - and in American English - /ɑːrkiˈɑːlədʒi/ . I was thinking we pronounced it as ay, but obviously we don't. But I think you mean the a is not needed - we certainly need the o, in British English at least (/ɒ/).

As I said earlier, some of us Brits simply like our spellings for things like manoeuvre (not manoeuver, incidentally) - and some of us like it this particular one because it reminds us of its French roots, which you don't like of course. Language is about so much more than just things being needed; it is also about identity (which you of all people should recognise; your delight in breaking the standard conventions of spelling is obviously part of your own identity). And British spelling is part of my identity and is what I'm used to, like and am comfortable with. Chacun à son goût.

Well if Microsoft say so, it must be right (!). I think I will stick with Oxford, which gives me a choice. And my choice will continue to be 'yesses' for the reasons I've given above. Admittedly the only other countable one syllable words with a vowel followed by s I can find are bus and gas, where single s is standard, which rather destroys my argument. But I just prefer the look of yesses to yeses. Luckily, I doubt that I will ever have to put this to the test in real life.

@HS - It seems that the pronunciation of both ligatures had changed to single vowel sounds in Latin before they reached English:

In Latin, the combination denotes a diphthong, pronounced [oi̯], that had a value similar to English oi as in coil. It was used in borrowings from Greek words having the diphthong OI (ΟΙ, οι). Both classical and modern practice is to write the letters separately, but the ligature was used in medieval and early modern writings, in part because œ was reduced to a simple vowel ([e]) in late Latin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%92

In Classical Latin, the combination AE denotes the diphthong [ai̯], which had a value similar to the long i in fine as pronounced in most dialects of modern English. Both classical and present practice is to write the letters separately, but the ligature was used in medieval and early modern writings in part because æ was reduced to the simple vowel [ɛ] in the imperial period. In some medieval scripts, the ligature was simplified to ę, small letter e with ogonek, the e caudata. This form further simplified into a plain e, which may have influenced or been influenced by the pronunciation change. However, the ligature is still relatively common in liturgical books and musical scores.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86

@HS - In the case of foetus, in the original Latin it was fetus, without a ligature. Presumably the addition of the ligature is down to a mistaken scholar. In the system used in the following definition ē is pronounced as in bee, so it looks as though modern pronunciation is in line with the original Latin.

fētus (not foet-), adj.
FEV-, filled with young, pregnant, breeding, with young : Lenta salix feto pecori, V.: volpes, H.— Fruitful, productive : terra frugibus: loca palustribus undis, O.— Filled, full : machina armis, V.— That has brought forth, newly delivered, nursing : lupa, V.: Uxor, Iu.—Plur f . as subst: temptabunt pabula fetas, mothers of the flock , V

(Lewis, Charlton, T. An Elementary Latin Dictionary. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago. American Book Company. 1890) - http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0060%3Aentry%3Dfetus1

But more generally, I repeat - what is 'correct' pronunciation? If you heard Shakespeare spoken in the pronunciation of the day, you probably wouldn't understand much. Do we take vowels as pronounced before or after the Great Vowel Shift as correct? And in what regional or national variation? If you're talking about the original Latin, do you take Classical Latin or the Demotic (which no doubt had a far greater impact on English) as correct. Which, as I've already shown, is important in the case of æ, as it was seemingly pronounced differently in Classical and Demotic Latin.

What, for example, is the 'correct' pronunciation of historic, hotel? With an aspirated H (as in the nineteenth century) or without? I don't think you like the American pronunciation of ballet, yet it's certainly nearer the original French, so does that make it more correct?

For me, do as the Romans do (but not necessarily did), in other words the correct pronunciation is simply whatever the standard pronunciation of the day is for your variety of the family of English.

Interesting, that in British books, if Ngram is anything to go by, the æ and œ ligatures gave way to ae and oe diphthongs around 1820, well before the invention of the typewriter.

This is the case with fæces, dæmon, fœtus, hyæna, Cæsar, chimæra, encyclopædia and manœuvre. It is uncanny how these ligature spellings are all replaced by diphthongs in almost exactly 1820 (although the process had started earlier), according to Ngram.

This change coincides with the introduction of the steam press in the 1820s, so I wonder if that had something to do with it.

@Chris B - my misunderstanding :)