Reply #6: There are a couple of issues with this.

[ZombieNixon]

1. Widespread use of English. So many people around the world speak English with their own little twist, and among those who are literate, the current, archaic orthographer serves as a potential unifier. It enables me to read a letter written by my grandfather in India, who, to the untrained ear, has an unintelligible accent.

2. Related: dialectical variation. No English-speaking country has had a "national academy" a la Germany or Spain to regulate the "proper" form of the language. As English spread throughout the world, every country that adopted some modicum of English as widespread has mixed it with local languages and accents to form a loosely-related collection of dialect, which sound very different from each other. The Queen's English and African-American vernacular are linguistically further apart than Danish and Norwegian, though while the latter two are considered separate languages, Queen Elizabeth and Kanye West are both considered to speak the same language, English. So, when our new spelling system comes into place, will a male sibling be a "brother," a "brəðə", a "brutha", or a "bro"?

3. Orthography. The 26 letters of the Latin alphabet are notoriously suited to writing English, a language with 44 phonemes, 11 or 12 of which are vowels, while Roman script has only five vowels and 21 consonants. We could adopt a couple of extra letters, like other Germanic languages, or retool the existing orthography. Gaelic uses a neat system where 50+ phonemes are representable using unique combinations of only 18 letters. Even just using the 26 letters. Wee cood com opp with a farely reguler sistem that, wile id mite look a littel weerd (lige Dotch, akchuelly), cood mage more senz.