[einhverfr]

> But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). Maybe this fragmentation would be much less if they had a phonetic writing system in the first place.

This is why Latin, which had such an alphabet, didn't split into mutually unintelligible dialects like Romanian, Spanish, and French, right?

> We can still read old texts, even though our pronunciation of the words has changed vastly. If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said, but practically speaking I don't see this as a big problem.

But this wouldn't be the case if we wrote English phonetically today.

For example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/Gawain?rgn=main;view=fulltex...) is one of my favorite pieces of Middle English literature, and exactly contemporary to Chaucer. It's hard enough to read without some knowledge of Middle English but you'd be totally lost if we wrote nait instead of knight.