[faho]

> I don't think speakers of the language that invented Worcester Sauce are in a position to give prescriptive logical advice to other languages.

Of course they are. They didn't invent it, and even if they did they could still be right on _this_ argument.

>Not only do common words tend to be shorter than uncommon ones; I've also seen examples of word pairs that would be dangerous to confuse to be further apart in spelling and pronunciation than statistics would suggest

And there's a whole bunch of counter-examples for that. One is the german "zwei" (the number 2) and "drei" (3). The german military commonly uses "zwo" for 2 because those two are so easily confused.

It's not like our languages are willfully poorly designed, but there's still a bunch of bad decisions in there, and we might be in a position to fix it, especially when it comes to things like spelling (which is mostly decreed from on high, since what schools teach matters most).