Nitpick, the pluralization phoneme in English is /z/, not /s/. To see this, note that we can have an [s] sound following a voiced sound at the end of a word, (e

Nitpick, the pluralization phoneme in English is /z/, not /s/. To see this, note that we can have an [s] sound following a voiced sound at the end of a word, (eg. floss vs flaws), but never have a [z] sound following an unvoiced sound at the end of a word. More relevantly, the difference between phonemic and phonetic representations can normally be derived from the phonetic context. For example, in the -s example mentioned above, English has a general rule that a /z/ sound following an unvoiced sound at the end of a word becomes [s]. Further, these rules come naturally to (native) speakers, so it is likely that we would not need to teach them much when we teach reading. >meet and meat. While this is a nice property, it seems like we only have it for some homophones by chance, not anything productive. Further, there is no productive way of knowing which writing is which meaning. > The 'th' digraph (retained in all spelling reforms I've been aware of) actually represents two distinct phonemes. This is a valid critism of existing attempts, but is probably a reflection of their pragmatic nature. If the ambiguity doesn't end up being a problem, then it is not worth introducing a new digraph to fix it. Most of the fixes in spelling reforms have been focused on removing oddities from the spelling system, instead of adding them to better accommodate the spoken system. Incidently, if we were to fix this, I would recomand adding the "dh" digraph for ð (as d is the voiced counterpart of t). > dʒ sound is not attested in English Judge >the places where it does come up (e.g., vision) How do you pronounce "vision". I only recal hearing it with the "ʒ" fricative, the "dʒ" affricative sounds weird. The bigger problem with spelling reform is is simple momentum. Adults already know the current spelling at a fairly deep level, so retraining them would be a massive effort for a payoff that they themselves would likely never see. Additionally, spelling reform would not be a one-time thing. As the language continues to drift, we will likely need a new set of reforms every few generations.