The objections

English is a mishmash of Old Norse, Old German, Old French, Middle French, and Latin, with a bit of other foreign adoptions. Unlike most other Western languages, English has generally preserved the spelling of words from their sources. And the result is a confused mess of spellings that aren’t consistent and that have few clear rules and many, many exceptions.

English spelling should be changed to improve the relationship of sounds to spellings.

Many prominent writers and thinkers have encouraged simplifying English spelling, including Ben Franklin, Noah Webster, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt, Melvil Dewey (creator of the Dewey Decimal System), and the staff of the Chicago Tribune for most of the 20th century. These have met with varying degrees of success, but little overall impact. Other languages, including Portuguese, German, French, Dutch, and Turkish have been reformed to greater or lesser degrees in the past century or so. Still others, such as Italian and Spanish are so simple that they don’t need any reform.

The three biggest objections to spelling reform are:

1. English spelling is fine and doesn’t need to change.
2. English spelling is so terrible that there is no way to fix it short of adopting a completely different spelling system.
3. Any spelling system that accurately reflects pronunciation would not be able to account for different regional accents.

I’ll deal with these one by one.

1) English spelling isn’t fine

English-speaking children take years to learn to read and write reliably. Speakers of Italian and Spanish lern it in a few months. Speakers of French, German, and the Scandinavian languages fall in between, but generally become highly proficient. English speakers continue to have great difficulty with spelling all their lives and have to rely on spell-checking software to avoid looking foolish. Difficulty reading and writing keeps many people from achieving the level of education that they want.

The traditional spellings are not really even the result of any methodical application of old principles, nor are they reflective of their origins. Silent letters were often added by scribes and printers to make things look more like Latin or French or just to line up on a page better. And language historians have carefully documented the origins of words; second graders shouldn’t need to learn them to be able to spell. And any good new spelling system would avoid obscuring word derivations—and do so better than the current system. (“Change Y to I and add ES”? Why?)

2) English spelling isn’t so terrible it can’t be fixed

English doesn’t need a perfectly regular spelling system in order for a reform effort to be of value. Even a modest reform can address enough of the biggest problems that English isn’t a constant frustration to every writer. If necessary, adults who have spent their lives lerning traditional spellings can continue to use them while young people learn the new spellings.

Besides, just because the neighbor’s dog keeps dragging trash into your yard doesn’t mean you should just live with a trash-covered lawn. A language requires a bit of maintenance to stay relevant. Dictionary makers update their lists and definitions; they should update their spellings from time to time also, with guidance from a recognized body. In fact, even a completely new and fully regular, phonemic spelling system could be implemented fairly painlessly by adopting it for pronunciation guides first and then adopting the pronunciation guide system as the standard spelling system.

3) A regular system wouldn’t be foiled by regional accents

Make no mistake. The goal is not a phonetic spelling system. That’s what linguists use to precisely describe sounds regardless of who is making them. The goal is a more phonemic system: one that spells the various meaningful bits of sound (phonemes) in a predictable way. You and I may pronounce a phoneme slightly differently because of our different accents, but that’s okay. We can still spell it the same way.

A good example is the letter R. Some Scottish accents roll their Rs. Most English and Australian, and some American accents drop their Rs in certain circumstances. Most American and Canadian accents pronounce Rs more or less the same way regardless of where it falls in the word. But everyone can recognize those various sounds as the same phoneme and can spell them with an R without much trouble. The letter R doesn’t describe exactly what sound is being made; it represents an idea; and that idea that can sound quite different from person to person and word-position to word-position.