The rules of spelling and pronunciation have evolved over time, and include all sorts of nonlinear effects: the 'ss' indicates short vowels around it (as all do

The rules of spelling and pronunciation have evolved over time, and include all sorts of nonlinear effects: the 'ss' indicates short vowels around it (as all double consonants do), and a sharp, voiceless 's'. For 's' it's the other way around. So ß fills a somewhat required place. That's not to say people wouldn't get around it, or get used to it. But trying to change the rules of languages top-down are like trying to change biology top-down: it makes a lot of sense, and yes, cells are the worst sort side-effect spaghetti-code, ever. But it won't make life easier. It's very much comparable to eliminating some random letter from the english alphabet. Life would definitely go on, but it would seem to be a net-negative suggestion to do so now. Hey, keyboards would be so much easier if we switched to binary. There's obviously the other side of that argument, saying that an alphabet of 80 letters is probably not the best idea. But having studied biology, I've seen too many examples of a messy long-term process arriving at something approaching an optimism, and of people taking a long time to grasp the elegance of some of these solutions, to be willing to entrust this domain to top-down decision making,