Reform rules

Everything the reform does is one of these twelve. They are deliberately few, and deliberately narrow: each names a specific thing that misleads a reader about pronunciation or meaning, and says what happens to it. Anything not named here is left exactly as English already spells it, which is four fifths of the dictionary.

1. No diacritics, and no new apostrophes. Nothing is added to the alphabet — no accents, no marks, and no apostrophe that traditional spelling does not already have.
2. A new spelling never collides with an existing word. Where a reform would produce a word that already means something else, the spelling changes to avoid it: could, should and would become coodd, shoodd and woodd rather than shorter forms that are already taken.
3. Third-person singular verbs end in -z. The -s ending stays on plural nouns and becomes -z on third-person present verbs — records the noun beside recordz the verb.
4. The past tense ends in -d, unless the e is needed to pronounce the word correctly: abandoned → abandond.
5. Silent gh becomes h, with the preceding vowels adjusted as needed: night → niht, through → thruh.
6. The gh that sounds like f becomes ff, again adjusting the vowels: tough → tuff, cough → coff.
7. ch becomes qh only where it is pronounced /tʃ/, as in church — church → qhurqh. Everywhere else ch keeps its /k/ reading, which leaves Greek-derived scientific vocabulary untouched.
8. ow becomes uw only where it is pronounced /aʊ/, as in cow — cow → cuw.
9. French ch and oi are spelled as they sound, sh and wa: chassis → shassi, memoir → memwar.
10. ou pronounced /uː/ becomes u or oo, whichever suits the word: you → yu, souvenir → soovenir.
11. Spurious letters are removed or replaced where they mislead about meaning or pronunciation — a final e that signals a long vowel the word does not have: live → liv, examine → examin.
12. Proper nouns are left alone. Capitalised common nouns and adjectives may change; names of people and places do not. Transliterated foreign names may be respelled.

What the rules deliberately do not settle

Rule three splits records from recordz, but nothing in the rules can tell you which one a given sentence wants. That is not an oversight — no context-free rule can decide it, which is the reason four centuries of reform proposals stalled at this point. The decision is made per word, from the surrounding text, by the disambiguator.