Words that should be respelt

[Urbane Guerrilla]

The end result of total, rigorous phoneticization of English orthography is the expansion of the alphabet from twenty-six characters to around forty. And this will only do, if fixed and unmodified, for a century or two.

See Omniglot, and suchlike neo-alphabets. All interesting, none likely to see use.

French is even more nuts about silent letters than English is, although its usage is more regularized owing to assigning authority over usage and orthography to the Academie Francaise. [French characters omitted] We get a lot of our use of silent letters used as signals to modify the sounds of letters preceding them from the French, which has four E sounds (conveniently indicated by four diacritical marks counting an occasionally used umlaut, and the absence of a diacritical) and a silent E, used to soften C, S or G, as well as a grammatical-gender indicator.