After perusing their site a little and looking at their examples, I can see why this is considered a lost cause. There are a number of even "basic substitutions" that don't jive with the way I've heard words pronounced or how I pronounce them myself.
For example, their basic substitutions convert "who" to "ho" - I doubt many Americans would think to pronounce these the same way - and "-ing" to "-ng" - which, while still more or less obvious, invokes a harder, more throat-y sound than the original to me.
I wish I had some grasp of pronunciation keys, as that would probably make this easier to convey...
All that aside, I can read the "advanced substitutions" with very little trouble. Though, I attribute that more to the amount of text in their examples than anything - context is king in English, after all.
You get used to the change very quickly. I often forget that I have the extension on and it will be 10 minutes into reading a long article before I suddenly notice that it is cutspel.
The one thing going for the approach is the barrier to entry is very low. No grand spelling reform, just organic change from the ground up one browser at a time :)
The site is inconsistent in it's own suggestions. "People" gets shorted to "peple", but "edible" is shortened to "edbl", losing its final e? And how do you tell that both L's are sounded in "holly"? I don't hear a difference in the sound of the Ls between 'holy' and 'holly', only the sound of the O. Why does 'eye' become 'y', which is not only a really bad contraction, but none of the rules suggest why the first 'e' is lost?
On a first reading, this new regime sounds like it's just as full of "you-just-have-to-knows" as the thing it's trying to solve - and it makes the context of the word even more important to figuring out what it means. For example, "eye" by itself is totally unambiguous. "y", suggested on the site, is the name of a letter (and the pronunciation of that is "why", not "aye"), and "ey" is yet another word with yet another pronunciation (contraction of "hey"). Nothing is gained from shortening "eye", and something is lost. I just don't see Cutspel actually solving more problems than it creates.
Finally, why is it "cutspel" instead of "cutspl"? The stress is on 'cut', so 'spell' doesn't need that unstressed E before the L, according to rule 2...
If you notice, the <e> of people/peple is /i/, which is different from the <e> of edible/edbl that is /e/.
The general rule of English taught in kindergartem is that the silent <e> makes a vowel letter "say its name". That's the difference between "mat" and "mate" or "kit" and "kite" (or "nit" and "nite"). Similarly, doubled consonants make the preceding vowel "short", as in "holy" and "holly", where the former vowel says its name and the latter does not. Not to endorse Cutspel at all, but these are ordinary rules of English spelling that are taught to everyone at the beginning of elementary school. Cutspel looks very inconsistent, yes.
Another problem with English is that by college, educated people have so internalized its eccentricities that they have forgotten how difficult it is for kindergarteners to learn ;) The big advantage of spelling reform would be teaching children to read faster and more easily, so that more classroom instructional time could be spent on actual content rather than something as ridiculous as spelling. Spelling is now mostly a tool to reify social class. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the...
Spelling reform isn't going to be solved by a browser extension replacing words, because some of the benefits of spelling reform involve things like disambiguating words that are spelled the same, like the noun "moderate" and the verb "moderate". http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/09/luv-u-giv.html
>Spelling reform isn't going to be solved by a browser extension replacing words
If you read my essay on why I wrote the extension, you will see that there have been more than 70 serous attempts to fix English spelling all of which have failed for the various reasons I list.
Cut Spelling is a step in the path to reforming English spelling, not the end - don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I can't answer for the rules of cut spelling as I did not develop it, but the nice thing about it that made me choose it was that it does not need to be implemented all at once. You can basically add each cut word one at at time to normal spelling.
I can answer why I chose cutspel rather than cutspl and that is it is easier to remember. It is the name of the chrome extension not the system of spelling reform which is called Cut Spelling.
For example, their basic substitutions convert "who" to "ho" - I doubt many Americans would think to pronounce these the same way - and "-ing" to "-ng" - which, while still more or less obvious, invokes a harder, more throat-y sound than the original to me.
I wish I had some grasp of pronunciation keys, as that would probably make this easier to convey...
All that aside, I can read the "advanced substitutions" with very little trouble. Though, I attribute that more to the amount of text in their examples than anything - context is king in English, after all.