Spelling is ruining the English language

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by monster

you must mean words overall, (i.e. including "and", "the"...) not just words that might need changing?

Because otherwise I'd love to see where you got the 1% from. having lived a significant time in the US and in two different accent areas of England, I find that figure hard to believe. Or in other words, I call BS on your stats.

Did you miss the bit about systematic variation?

Speakers with the General American (GA) accent do not round the lips when they say words like "pot" and "bomb". The result is pronounced differently. So too does the Received Pronunciation (RP) accent not pronounce the letter R before a consonant. Americans pronounce words like "past" using a conservative pronunciation, but the British accent uses a broad vowel. These and other similar variations are entirely systematic, and the pronunciations of these words can be predicted just from knowledge of the general properties of the accents in question without hearing the individual words in advance.

It is only a minority of words that vary non-systematically, and hence in an unpredictable way between the RP and GA accents. Aluminium (which has a separate spelling "aluminum" in American English), vase, thorough.