[navark]

It's too bad that none of these reforms have succeeded. English has become the Lingua Franca due to the influence of the British Empire and American culture, along with it's ability to incorporate loanwords, but not because of it's spelling. Helping my kids learn how to read struck me by how insane English spelling really is.

I recently found out that Theodore Roosevelt had signed an executive order to adopt new spelling rules from the Simplified Spelling Board in 1906, but backtracked when the press began mocking it. If it had been a better organized release it could have succeeded but now it's a cautionary tale.

The future timeline extends out forever, if humanity is going to continue to primarily use an English-rooted language we need to make intentional improvements or we will be stuck with increased entropy, see the introduction of emoji's into text for example.

[Taikonerd]

Agreed! It's sort of perverse: the more people speak English, the harder it is to reform it.