In 1992 the Simplified Spelling Society in England published "Cut Spelling", a book which proposed reforming the spelling of English by deleting all the unnecessary letters that are used in traditional spelling.
The Simplified Spelling Society was disappointed that its New Spelling proposals (1948) had not been adopted, but they could see that the problem was that New Spelling was too different for people to be able to change readily to the new system. So Cut Spelling was designed to be much less drastic in the changes - most changes would involve only the deletion of certain non-essential letters.
Cut Spelling lists several types of letters that are not essential. The first group, like 'e' in 'love', 'gh' in 'though', and 'w' in ‘answer’, were sounded in old versions of English but became silent centuries ago. Another group were taken from foreign words but are not sounded in the English versions - such as 'ch' in 'yacht' (Dutch), 'h' in 'honest' (French), and 'p' in 'psyche' (Greek). Yet others were introduced to show the derivation of the word - (although such introductions were often made in error) - such as 'b' in 'doubt', 'c' in 'scythe'.
Cut Spelling deletes the unstressed vowel such as the 'e' in 'chapel' - giving chapl (chapel), entr (enter), fathm (fathom), resistnt (resistant), and edbl (edible). Also, vowel sounds traditionally written with two letters can often be written with one, so that we can delete the 'a' in ‘measure’, the 'e' in 'hearth', and the 'i' in 'friend'.
Cut Spelling changes most double consonants to single ones - as in abreviate (abbreviate) and compeld (compelled). However there are a large number of cases where this is not possible - for example 'hiss' as compared with 'his', 'tinny' compared with 'tiny', and 'furry' compared with 'fury'.
As well as these deletions, Cut Spelling also makes a few substitutions. using 'f' instead of 'ph' or 'gh' for the 'f' sound, and 'j' instead of 'g' or 'dg for the 'j' sound.
Basically, Cut Spelling is a very simple system yielding words that do not look very different from traditional spelling. But by keeping the rules simple the system leaves more inconsistencies and illogical spellings than it avoids. Although 'mate' retains its spelling, 'sign' becomes 'sin', 'could' becomes 'cud', and 'storage' becomes 'storaj'. The spelling by no means gives a good indication of the pronunciation, and if anything there is more confusion than with traditional spelling.
Here is an example of Cut Spelling:
One first notices that one can imediatly read Cut Spelng quite esily without even noing th rules
of th systm. Since most words ar unchanjed and few letrs substituted, one has th impression of norml ritn
english with a lot of od slips, rathr than of a totaly new riting systm.
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