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So basically English spelling is trapped in a local minimum. An small change will make spelling closer to some dialect, and further from most other dialects. Th

• rootbear 6y ago
  I personally think there's a lot of room for improvements that would work in nearly all English dialects. The "ough" mess, for example, could stand some clean up. But in general, yes, there is too much variation in English around the world to "fix" it now.
  • naniwaduni 6y ago
    You're hitting the phonological analogue of Moravec's law: the "ough" mess is precisely the kind of thing that can't easily be simplified in a way that works across English dialects. It hits a wide swath of basic vocabulary that originally had a small range of slightly awkward pronunciations that diverged in descendant English. Different dialects don't split those pronunciations the same way. The real low-hanging fruit is getting the British to give up on those spellings that follow a dead branch of French ;-)
• hannasanarion 6y ago
  That's certainly true for things like vowels, but there are other situations where spelling could be changed with no ambiguity problems in any dialect. For example, basically every word that contains "gh" can be simplified, as <gh> represents a /x/ sound like German "Bach" that dropped out of the language in the 1200s. Nobody is confused by "tho" and "thru". Another easy example is just fixing "island". The <s> was never pronounced. Medieval scribes put it there because they incorrectly guessed that the word was related to Latin "insula".