Comment by DiogenesKynikos
2 days ago
We don't really manage it with speaking. I don't understand highland Scottish dialects at all. I have trouble understanding Cockney.
Yet people who speak those dialects can write anything down and I'll understand it perfectly with no effort.
You don't understand the value of standardization. It's what makes reading fast and independent of dialect. People who read English don't literally sound out the letters. They recognize the whole word instantly. Sounding out the letters is only a fallback mechanism.
What you're proposing might work for a tiny language with only one main dialect. English is a global language with a huge number of dialects. Major languages like this need standardized writing systems, and to no one's surprise, they all have them.
This is the argument that Chinese use for keeping their characters. It's ultimate expression is defending electric motor to be written as "lighting clouds power tree table" because if we didn't then it would be anarchy.
English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
That someone in a two sheep village in Scotland might have trouble reading War and Peace isn't a reason to abuse every child for a decade before they too develop the same brain damage as the adults who abused them.
The Chinese have many good arguments for keeping their characters, which go far beyond mutual intelligibility.
But you don't have to go all the way to "English should switch to hieroglyphs" to see that keeping a uniform but imperfect phonetic system is far superior to having everyone write their own partially intelligible dialect however they want.
> English is intelligible enough that someone from Vancouver can easily talk to someone from Sydney and every other major population center in between.
I assume you mean going East from Vancouver, because there are practically no major population centers practically in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
But no, the dialects spoken in the major English-speaking population centers are not mutually intelligible. An American exposed to Cockney, a major English dialect, for the first time will have no idea that is being said.
Here's the future you want:
"Ai fink va braan kye-ao iz ow-va ve-ya bai va waw-ʔuh."
How many Americans do you think will understand that at first sight?