Comment by DiogenesKynikos

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?