Comment by noosphr

> In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade.

In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade. If your parents didn't teach you before that, like mine did.

> Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize.

There are rules though, that we're ad-hoc taught as kids, or just absorb through exposure. Just because there's a lot of exceptions doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's an attempt at listing them out: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html

To be technical: the term is phonemic, not phonetic. If we spelled phonetically, we'd have different symbols for the p in 'spin' and the p+h in 'pin'. Similarly for 'tick' and 'stick', and 'scale' and 'kale'. Native English speakers generally don't notice the differences, just like speakers of many oriental languages don't easily recognize the difference between English /l/ and /r/.

OTOH, I’ve seen what y’all call cursive, and want no part of it.

Then under your definition there must not be any widely used written language with an alphabet. Most of the world's alphabetic writing systems aren't phonetic transcriptions, they're standardized. They're usually based on the prestige dialect, at the cost of diminutizing other dialects.

For example, Spanish has a fairly consistent spelling system standardized by RAE, based in Madrid. But, for instance, even though much of Latin America doesn't have a distinction between s and soft c (seseo), they still keep the distinction in its spelling.

That's kind of a mean and not very relevant response.

The point is that if anyone wanted to reform English spelling, they would have to choose a particular dialect to standardize around.

There is no standard English dialect. There is a relatively standard version of American English ("Walter Cronkite English"), and there is Received Pronunciation in England, but then there are all sorts of other dialects that are dominant elsewhere (Scotland, Ireland, India, etc.).

Which one should we choose to base our orthography on? Or should we allow English spelling to splinter into several completely different systems? Yes, there are already slight differences in British vs. American spelling, but they're extremely minor compared to the differences in pronunciation.

And after this spelling reform, will people still be able to read anything written before the reform, or will that become a specialized ability that most people don't learn?

The best case is a syllabary with how the word was pronounced a few years previous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

> Around 1809, ... Sequoyah began work to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. ... He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he originally created.

> After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society.[4] By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography. ...

> Albert Gallatin ... believed [the syllabary] was superior to the English alphabet in that literacy could be easily achieved for Cherokee at a time when only one-third of English-speaking people achieved the same goal.[6] He recognized that even though the Cherokee student must learn 85 characters instead of 26 for English, the Cherokee could read immediately after learning all the symbols. The Cherokee student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing might require two years to achieve.

That's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s. "Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are spelled as they sound.