Comment by DiogenesKynikos
2 days ago
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?
You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can understand how people speak you will understand how they write.
So you want a thousand different writing systems, or everyone just winging it as they go along?
That would make reading anything extremely slow and difficult.
Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.
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And yet we manage it with speaking. This is why I call it brain damage. It's like trying to explain red to a blind woman.
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