[DiogenesKynikos]

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?

[noosphr]

You don't standardise. That's the point. If you can understand how people speak you will understand how they write.

[DiogenesKynikos]

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.

[withinboredom]

Worked for thousands of years with other phonetic written languages. Words change spelling over time, instead of pronounciation drifting without the spelling changing.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Define "worked."

You're proposing to make reading just as difficult as understanding every other dialect of spoken English - something even most native speakers have difficulty with.

Your proposal would also eliminate whole-word recognition, which is what makes reading fast. It would slow us all down to the speed of young children just learning to sound out the letters.

[withinboredom]

Right. Because everyone gets confused when you write behavior instead of behaviour or license/licence or analyze/analyse. It’s so confusing that there are already different ways to spell the same thing.

American English isn’t the only spelling of English.

[DiogenesKynikos]

There are exactly two ways to write license. What you're proposing is that there should be 20 different ways to write it, depending on what particular dialect of English you speak.

[noosphr]

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.

[DiogenesKynikos]

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.

[noosphr]

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.

[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?