An Attempt to Fix English Spelling (AKA Mission: Impossible)

[ol bofosh]

The real problem with spelling reform is that it's largely pointless. It's unlikely much will happen along those lines, other than a few of the really weird spellings being forgotten (eg hiccough), and maybe increasing neutralisation of letters for schwa to <e> or <u>, particularly in -@nt endings where there's a fair random alternation between <a> and <e>. But by and large, English spelling is far too useful as it is to be degraded by regularisation.

Spelling reformers lean on the "it's difficult to learn". This means it takes longer to learn and more resources to learn, and is more expensive. The problem being that most people who have learnt it and use it have little problems with it. There's a barrier, but not an impossible one. People who can't, have difficulty to or are learning to read English (children, non-anglophones, illiterates, dislexics, etc.) don't have a say since what we have is so well established. And spelling reformers are 1. a minority and 2. too competitive and not collaborative enough.

http://www.spellingsociety.org/spelling/costs
IThey may have a point, but it's gonna take some doing for all anglophone countries to take it seriously.

The reasons for this irregularity are complex and largely historical. But the economic and social costs are serious. English speaking children take on average three years longer to learn to read and write than others and some never succeed. Our dyslexics struggle in a way that Italian and Spanish children do not. Adult illiteracy remains stubbornly high (23%).

Having said that (and yes, I've worked out my own schemes in the past), one interesting idea that didn't occur to me until this thread is to have a system with one-way sight-to-sound predictability, but NOT sound-to-sight predictability. That is, if you can read the word you know how it is said, but if you hear the word you don't know how it's written.

I'v dun sumthing like that with Vair.

[kanejam]

I agree that spelling reform isn't likely to happen in any great capacity in the foreseeable future. All the different Englishes are still largely intelligible, and on the few occasions that meaning isn't clear, one can generally just shift to a slightly higher register.

I hadn't seen the SR1 before and haven't really seen it in action; it seems like a very good reform as it is quite subtle and makes sense. IMO the dropping of useless e's would be the most noticeable and changes the aesthetic of the language the most. 'wer, som, vally, giv' are all a bit jarring to me. But in a couple of generation's time all the people against the change will be gone and life will go on with the new spellings ingrained. A very similar topic was brought up on the list recently, I think by the user either here or on the other board called Lao Kou. Basically, unless you grew up with an older system, reforms aren't going to bother. I happily use simplified Chinese characters because that is what I was taught, although there are many traditional-users who find them ugly and whatnot.

Having said that I quite like writing English with how I see it as 'proper'. Obviously I don't mean to say there is a correct way to right anymore than there is a correct way to speak, but I do like to write hiccough and doughnut and all sorts of things like that. For all the people complaining that English is difficult and should be reformed, there will be just as many people saying it shouldn't.

Lastly, I have toyed a few times with just adding diacritics to vowels that aren't pronounced in a predictable way, but it's true that it means more to memorise without actually simplifying anything. Maybe it could be used solely as an aid for foreign language students? The way niqqud are used in Hebrew script? I doubt that even that would have any sort of real benefit.

Edit: I forgot to reinforce the fact that while spelling reform doesn't take too long for people to forget about the old system, it won't happen in English. Among the most prominent reasons is that, as most people have said before, there is no central body to govern any changes.

Double Edit: I also left out manoeuvre. I mean just look at that word, it almost makes me shudder

[jmcd]

@Awer and Jipi:
Laziness can only ever be part of the explanation though. Another factor is two phonemes can become more distinct so it's easier to distinguish them. The Great Vowel Shift better fits into this.

A third factor is that languages have certain tendencies for particular phonetic qualities. Linked into these is that, in general, if a language has many phonemes in a particular area, it's in this area that they'll be most variable: in English dialects, it's the vowels that are most variable, between Slavic languages it's the sibilants and affricates.

Then of course there's interaction: loan phonemes, the language being adopted by neighbours so getting pronounced with their accent, being conquered by a neighbour so your language becomes closer to theirs.

Then there's the fact that language represents an aspect of culture and relates to identity and so sound changes can appear or be accentuated due to a willingness to distinguish oneself from another or other peoples.

In addition, we have the possibility, nowadays we could almost say certainty, of an authority condoning a particular pronunciation.

Furthermore, sound changes can take place within one part of society and then spread to other parts e.g. fisherman start a new pronunciation of words which then is adopted by coastal villages and then the surrounding countryside or immigrant pronunciations spread into the general lower class pronunciation of a city and then into the other classes. But then that (and the authority cause) is more a method of how a sound change might spread rather than the motivation for it in the first place.

In fact, I would say that laziness is not the more important of these influences; interaction, identity and authority are all more important. After all, Icelandic is the most conservative of the Scandinavian languages not because the Icelanders are famous for being hardworking in their mouthwork, but because they are the most isolated with the longest unbroken literature.

Also that grammatical change, semantic change and sound change can all feed into each other. So on the one hand, a sound change can mean two forms merge so that one or both might be replaced with another so they can be distinguished. But also on the other hand, grammatical and semantic change can influence sound change. For example, the development of a new particle can influence the phonetic quality of the surrounding phonemes. The pronunciation of English -ing with [n] is more influenced by the merger of two grammatical forms than a general IN><In change (which despite the shorter spelling is hard to describe as laziness).

Which all makes me think there's a subtle depth to sound change plausibility that has not yet necessarily been reached in conlanging.

-----

As for the Great Vowel Shift, it surprises me to see the name-day merger so early seeing as there is still the option between [e] and [ei] type forms.

And that Spelling Society does hav sum good points. And yoo don't actually need all the English-speaking cuntries on board; just sum.

[Nortaneous]

Spelling reforms are a terrible idea.

cuntries

I rest my case.

[jmcd]

Spelling reforms are a terrible idea.

cuntries

I rest my case.

Oh how rude! Almost as rude as j'habite..

[Salmoneus]

Bofosh: being difficult to learn isn't a bug, it's a feature. It enables literacy to be used as a marker of group affiliation. You think all those Americans who want to "make English the official language" are going to want to change the spelling of English to make it easier for illegal immigrants to learn? Or that universities and prestigious papers are going to want to have their writers write in textspeak so that anyone can get a job with them even if they can' spell properly?

Speaking of Americans: don't blame the failures of American (or even British) public services on the alphabet! If Anglophone schools don't work, that doesnt' mean it's the fault of the language. Besides, that 23% figure is bollocks. It's an inflation of a figure found in a school writing project based on an OECD report from decades ago that claimed that 20% of the British public had only a minimal functional reading comprehension level - but that was discussing intellectual comprehension of paragraphs of text, not the ability to spell accurately or to understand individual words. The actual broadly-defined 'functional illiteracy' rate is more like 13%, and the ACTUAL illiteracy rate is less than 1%.

[KathTheDragon]

Spelling reforms are a terrible idea.

cuntries

I rest my case.

Therapist.

[sangi39]

Analrapist

That and manslaughter's always a fun one

[Salmoneus]

The old joke: "we put the 'laughter' into 'slaughter' and the 'fun' into 'fundamentalism'..."

[KathTheDragon]

Looks like we're going to have to reform English anyway to get rid of these words-inside-words.

[ol bofosh]

Bofosh: being difficult to learn isn't a bug, it's a feature.

It's relative. For me it's a feature, as for most literate anglophones. I can read and spell well enough, no matter its idiosynchracies. For an illiterate or dyslexic who's style and even quality of life would greatly improve with a more phonemic alphabet it has so meny "features" as to be a bug. Wouldn't solve everything, and I don't know if it would solve much, but I'm convinced that's it's necessary, even if it's just SR1.

All spelling systems have their idiosynchracies, and there will always be difficulties to learn to read and write; it is a discipline. Like eny discipline you need to work at it to achieve enything in it. English shouldn't and can't be free of idiosynchracies, but perhaps it should have them ironed out a bit.

I think really English missed the spelling reform boat a few centuries ago. Current conditions aren't optimal for it enymore; eny reform suggestion, like SR1, will be a generational thing, not something widely accepted, but I'll give it a go enyway.

It enables literacy to be used as a marker of group affiliation.

I don't know what you mean here. What sort of groups are you talking about? The educated and uneducated, or something else?

You think all those Americans who want to "make English the official language" are going to want to change the spelling of English to make it easier for illegal immigrants to learn? Or that universities and prestigious papers are going to want to have their writers write in textspeak so that anyone can get a job with them even if they can' spell properly?

No, that's unlikely to happen. The Austrailian government tried to implement SR1, which worked for a little while, but died a deth when the gov changed hands.
I don't even know if enyone's still using it. English spelling is grass roots and gradual. Textspeak won't turn up in meny syllabuses for a few generations, I'd guess.

[Salmoneus]

Bofosh: being difficult to learn isn't a bug, it's a feature.

It's relative. For me it's a feature, as for most literate anglophones. I can read and spell well enough, no matter its idiosynchracies. For an illiterate or dyslexic who's style and even quality of life would greatly improve with a more phonemic alphabet it has so meny "features" as to be a bug. Wouldn't solve everything, and I don't know if it would solve much, but I'm convinced that's it's necessary, even if it's just SR1.

All spelling systems have their idiosynchracies, and there will always be difficulties to learn to read and write; it is a discipline. Like eny discipline you need to work at it to achieve enything in it. English shouldn't and can't be free of idiosynchracies, but perhaps it should have them ironed out a bit.

I think really English missed the spelling reform boat a few centuries ago. Current conditions aren't optimal for it enymore; eny reform suggestion, like SR1, will be a generational thing, not something widely accepted, but I'll give it a go enyway.

Seriously? Your spelling reform demands 'idiosynchracies'? Shouldn't spelling reforms make things simpler and easier, not more unpredictable and baroque? [I also don't know why you'd want to waste goodwill on changes that are superfluous because the existing spelling and pronunciation are already perfectly regular (eg 'Austrailia' - if anything has to be changed there, it's the irregular first vowel, not the regular second), and even on changes that make pronunciation LESS predictable, or at least are as bas as the status quo (eg 'eny', which is no better than 'any' (the 'correct' spelling would be 'enny')).]

Anyway, reform is not necessary. This can be seen from the fact it hasn't happened, and the fact that almost everyone agrees that it won't happen.

The existing system may disadvantage some, but those are a minority.

Indeed, I'd even question how much changes would help. For instance, several members of my family have the aural equivalent of dyslexia - they can't accurately repeat rhythms or pitch sequences (unless it's a very catchy tune), and, more relevantly, can't accurately correlate sounds to symbols (they can't 'picture' the sound that a given letter or sequence of letters should 'make'). What they can do is remember word shapes and spellings as units, and indeed the more distinctive the word shape the better - so they've no problem spelling a lot of 'difficult' words, but struggle to know whether a consonant should be doubled or not because they can't keep the 'long' and the 'short' vowels straight, and they can't use the 'sounding out' method of guessing the pronunciation of words they don't recognise either. So if you get rid of the more recognisable and irregular spellings and make everything more phonemic, they'll actually find it a lot harder than they do no, with the current system. And it turns out this isn't so different from dyslexia anyway - indeed, it's more or less the same as dyslexia, just with a different emphasis. Dyslexia isn't about not being able to spell, it's about not being able to do phonemic analysis reliably and instinctively - so making a spelling system MORE phonemic should make things worse, not better, for dyslexics.

And you know what? So far as we can tell, there are far fewer dyslexics reading Chinese and Japanese than there with Latin-script alphabets, and some people have been shown to be dyslexic with latin script but not dyslexic in chinese. [And those who are dyslexic in chinese seem to have problems in a different part of the brain from latin-script dyslexics (ie visual rather than phonemic processing areas)]. So if you're dyslexic, you should want English spelling to become MORE irregular, and closer to a Chinese-style visual-recognition system.

It enables literacy to be used as a marker of group affiliation.

I don't know what you mean here. What sort of groups are you talking about? The educated and uneducated, or something else?

Educated/uneducated, posh/nonposh, native/foreign, english/american, etc etc.

You think all those Americans who want to "make English the official language" are going to want to change the spelling of English to make it easier for illegal immigrants to learn? Or that universities and prestigious papers are going to want to have their writers write in textspeak so that anyone can get a job with them even if they can' spell properly?

No, that's unlikely to happen. The Austrailian government tried to implement SR1, which worked for a little while, but died a deth when the gov changed hands.
I don't even know if enyone's still using it. English spelling is grass roots and gradual. Textspeak won't turn up in meny syllabuses for a few generations, I'd guess.

My point is, the reason these people don't want the system to change is that the system as it is gives them a benefit that reform would not give them.

[jmcd]

So basically, without spelling reform, people can't judge others so easily on the way they say things rather than what they're actually saying. As far as I'm concerned, that's an advantage of spelling reform.

Anyway, I don't know if yous have seen Learning to Read by Mikko Aro but it does show how English speakers take a lot longer to learn how to read and write than the other people in Europe, with French and Danish speakers taking long as well but not as long as English speakers. English speakers take four years to get the decent level of literacy that speakers of other languages take only one year to get. That's a waste of three years' learning.

It seems that the main opposition to spelling reform is due to people being pro-status quo. This seems to be a common problem with English-speakers, along with their apathy. If spelling reform was already instituted, nobody would think of adopting the current system.

So we should either abandon English spelling or English.

[KathTheDragon]

Quite clearly abandoning English is a long, long way out of the question.

[ol bofosh]

Seriously? Your spelling reform demands 'idiosynchracies'?

No, I think it's unavoidable. I don't consider eliminating idiosynchracies, but reducing them. Or maybe the spelling system can have be perfectly phonemic, but the accent/s which it is supposed to represent won't always correspond exactly (not all RP speakers will pronounce things the way it says in the Oxford dictionary, for example). The other thing is if we make something more phonemic then we can have more semantic ambiguity (u, you, yew, ewe). Do we reduce semantic or phonemic ambiguity? Do we leave semantic interpretation to context? (I saw a yew tree; I saw a ewe in labour; I saw you in the street; I like the letter u). Or phonemes to context? (I read those yesterday; I read those when I'm bored).

I also don't know why you'd want to waste goodwill on changes that are superfluous because the existing spelling and pronunciation are already perfectly regular

I often come across new words that I don't know the pronunciations of. The other day I saw "barrage" and couldn't remember if it was /b@"rA:z/ or /"b{rA:Z/. I also considered /"b{reIdZ/ and /"b{ridZ/ just for the hell of it, but that seemed the least likely. It's true that you can look at most words and come up with a few predictable possibilities (like barrage). A spelling reform would be about reducing these possibilities.
I know a few people (non-native anglophones) that do "spelling pronounciations", which in native speach don't exist AFAIK (says as /sejs/, money as /"monej/, comfortable as /kom"fortab@l/). Not normally a problem, though it will always mark "outsiders".

Anyway, reform is not necessary. This can be seen from the fact it hasn't happened, and the fact that almost everyone agrees that it won't happen.

The existing system may disadvantage some, but those are a minority.

The necessity of a spelling reform is subjective. If the majority says it's not necessary then you'd better believe them, because they'll usually have their way, like it or not. Like I sed before, I generally don't have problems with English spelling as it is, but I see that others do, and I remember my problems when I was a kid learning to read. I was frustrated because of its irregularity, but I think even more by the lack of good explanations I got. "That's the way everyone does it" never quite satisfied me, and still doesn't (thankfully).

Now, it takes longer to teach children to read and write English than in most of their European counterparts. That means more resources and more money invested than in simpler orthographies. Maybe that's a problem, maybe not. Is it more time and energy than necessary? Some think so, some not, and I think most people don't even know about it, let alone consider it. My vote is that it is necessary, but that vote has to go alongside others; I don't live in a vacuum.

But it also takes time and energy to reform spelling, which might not be so efficient as leaving spelling alone. But I think there are ways to do it without expending too much energy: small ones like SR1 and informal spelling variations (tho, thru, nite, lite, etc.). Another possibility is insted of changing spelling over night, create an alternative spelling system that co-exists with the present one and will become more popular or die a deth. That's natural selection.

Small gradual reforms are seem to be what work for English, so that's the way to go IMO.

I see maintaining my use and knowledge of the present orthography as necessary. Ädhêwaiz ai'd bi raitiñ sämthiñ laik dhis òl dhê taim, but the point of language is communication, and writing "however the hell I want" would sabotage my effort to communicate (my own family would complain and not take me so seriously, and it would probably result in less visits to my blogs - I must admit to sometimes skipping posts written in a rather developed spelling reform when I'm tired, and raitiñ in ê rìfòm òlseu teiks taim and efêt).

And you know what? So far as we can tell, there are far fewer dyslexics reading Chinese and Japanese than there with Latin-script alphabets, and some people have been shown to be dyslexic with latin script but not dyslexic in chinese. [And those who are dyslexic in chinese seem to have problems in a different part of the brain from latin-script dyslexics (ie visual rather than phonemic processing areas)]. So if you're dyslexic, you should want English spelling to become MORE irregular, and closer to a Chinese-style visual-recognition system.

I didn't realise that, but you're right. Making English more phonemic would favour some forms of dislexia but not others. I don't really know enough to say which way would be advantageous or not.

My point is, the reason these people don't want the system to change is that the system as it is gives them a benefit that reform would not give them.

[/quote]
Yep, exactly. I think that's why the Spelling Society concentrate on raising awareness rather than push any particular. I was surprised to hear that they did try to encourage if not enforce spelling reforms in their newsletter but in the end had to revert to Traditional Spelling (TS) as the reforms were too difficult for people to read, especially the longer articles. So if spelling reform is slow within a pro-reform entity, it's downright geological outside of it. If they can't reach an agreement between them after a hundred years - people that actively want a reform - just how much less it'll happen outside the Society! I don't know if I can take seriously any spelling reform societies that don't apply spelling reforms to their own website, or at least provide a "translated" version in parallel to their TS version.

[Nortaneous]

уай нат джыст суич ту сирилик? итс гат мор ваулз, фор уын, анд иф пийпл ар гоинг ту хаф ту лрн е нуу систм енийуей...

[KathTheDragon]

The best way to start with a spelling reform, IMO, is to change only the most deviant spellings, like <debt>. Wait for that to become standard, then move on, but only in little steps. After all, you can't run before you learn to walk (or however that lovely little quote goes.)

[Herr Dunkel]

Also /liːd /riːd/ vs. /lɛd rɛd/, compare /spiːd/ vs. /spɛd/

[Salmoneus]

Seriously? Your spelling reform demands 'idiosynchracies'?

No, I think it's unavoidable. I don't consider eliminating idiosynchracies, but reducing them. Or maybe the spelling system can have be perfectly phonemic, but the accent/s which it is supposed to represent won't always correspond exactly (not all RP speakers will pronounce things the way it says in the Oxford dictionary, for example). The other thing is if we make something more phonemic then we can have more semantic ambiguity (u, you, yew, ewe). Do we reduce semantic or phonemic ambiguity? Do we leave semantic interpretation to context? (I saw a yew tree; I saw a ewe in labour; I saw you in the street; I like the letter u). Or phonemes to context? (I read those yesterday; I read those when I'm bored).

No, you missed my point, which was that you wrote 'idiosynchracies', instead of the standard "idiosyncrasies". I guess I can see <c> over <s>, but why on earth would it be a good idea to randomly introduce <h>s into the middle of words?

I also don't know why you'd want to waste goodwill on changes that are superfluous because the existing spelling and pronunciation are already perfectly regular

I often come across new words that I don't know the pronunciations of. The other day I saw "barrage" and couldn't remember if it was /b@"rA:z/ or /"b{rA:Z/. I also considered /"b{reIdZ/ and /"b{ridZ/ just for the hell of it, but that seemed the least likely. It's true that you can look at most words and come up with a few predictable possibilities (like barrage). A spelling reform would be about reducing these possibilities.
I know a few people (non-native anglophones) that do "spelling pronounciations", which in native speach don't exist AFAIK (says as /sejs/, money as /"monej/, comfortable as /kom"fortab@l/). Not normally a problem, though it will always mark "outsiders".

First, you overlook the actual examples you gave. You respelled 'any' as 'eny', and 'Australia' as 'Austrailia'. The first is no improvement in terms of phonemicity, while the second ignores the troublesome element of the word (which isn't all that troublesome anyway) and makes more complicated the element of the word that is already entirely regular and predictable.
Second, your new examples bring us to another point. "Barrage" is spelled and pronounced regularly - you want us to make it irregular. Because at the moment the spelling is agnostic between several pronunciations - imposing a more directly phonemic spelling to match any one of those pronunciations will make the spelling more irregular for those who do not pronounce it the same way that you do! [In this case it's mostly a UK vs US split]

Anyway, reform is not necessary. This can be seen from the fact it hasn't happened, and the fact that almost everyone agrees that it won't happen.

The existing system may disadvantage some, but those are a minority.

The necessity of a spelling reform is subjective.

No, not at all. If something is necessary, it cannot but happen - that's what 'necessary' means. The fact that it has not happened proves that it has not so far been necessary, and the fact that there seems to be no imminent prospect of it happening gives us strong reason to believe it will not prove necessary in the foreseeable future either.
I think you might be confusing 'necessary' with 'something I personally would sort of like'. Which is fair enough, semantic drift and all that, but it does rather take away from the force of your earlier declaration.

If the majority says it's not necessary then you'd better believe them, because they'll usually have their way, like it or not. Like I sed before, I generally don't have problems with English spelling as it is, but I see that others do, and I remember my problems when I was a kid learning to read. I was frustrated because of its irregularity, but I think even more by the lack of good explanations I got. "That's the way everyone does it" never quite satisfied me, and still doesn't (thankfully).

Now, it takes longer to teach children to read and write English than in most of their European counterparts. That means more resources and more money invested than in simpler orthographies. Maybe that's a problem, maybe not. Is it more time and energy than necessary? Some think so, some not, and I think most people don't even know about it, let alone consider it. My vote is that it is necessary, but that vote has to go alongside others; I don't live in a vacuum.

This assumes that a) it genuinely is harder to teach English than other languages, and b) that this is a problem. On the first, I don't think you can fairly compare, because of the shitness (and general differentness) of the English educational system compared to European systems. It's well known that our 'bung them into school as soon as they can walk and then give them standardised tests every three months, and if possible get them to stay in school from dawn to dusk to prevent any contact with the parents' approach gives substantially sub-optimal results both in psychological well-being and even in education achievement. Of course English children are slower at learning to read - they're slower at everything. [And no, I don't think introducing a 'phonics' system that works great at teaching kids to read perfectly phonetic orthographies will greatly improve matters - the objective of that policy is more a 'no child left behind', minimise-failure target, rather than maximising learning speed for the majority].
On b) - well, bilingual children also have slower language learning, but that's not necessarily considered a problem.

[Jipí]

уай нат джыст суич ту сирилик? итс гат мор ваулз, фор уын, анд иф пийпл ар гоинг ту хаф ту лрн е нуу систм енийуей...

But that would turn us all into filthy pinko commies!~

[ol bofosh]

The best way to start with a spelling reform, IMO, is to change only the most deviant spellings, like <debt>. Wait for that to become standard, then move on, but only in little steps. After all, you can't run before you learn to walk (or however that lovely little quote goes.)

I think that'd be the best way. The most practicable way.

No, you missed my point, which was that you wrote 'idiosynchracies', instead of the standard "idiosyncrasies". I guess I can see <c> over <s>, but why on earth would it be a good idea to randomly introduce <h>s into the middle of words?

Oh, okay, those sorts of idiosynchracies. Spanish has a few, and yet still manages to be fairly regular. <za ce ci zo zu> /Ta Te Ti To Tu/. All spelling systems have their idiosyncrasies; Spanish has faily predictable rules for them, but most English idiosyncrasies aren't really "rules", they're conventions passed down to us from history.

Fact is I don't know how to spell idiosyncrasies (well, I do now, thanks). I rely on spellcheck too much for some words.

First, you overlook the actual examples you gave. You respelled 'any' as 'eny', and 'Australia' as 'Austrailia'. The first is no improvement in terms of phonemicity, while the second ignores the troublesome element of the word (which isn't all that troublesome anyway) and makes more complicated the element of the word that is already entirely regular and predictable. Second, your new examples bring us to another point. "Barrage" is spelled and pronounced regularly - you want us to make it irregular. Because at the moment the spelling is agnostic between several pronunciations - imposing a more directly phonemic spelling to match any one of those pronunciations will make the spelling more irregular for those who do not pronounce it the same way that you do! [In this case it's mostly a UK vs US split]

<eny> is the application of SR1. <Austrailia> is a typo. Another word I don't have much practice of using.

And Firefox doesn't seem to have spellcheck. I'd been using opera, which does.

I'd be happy to spell in a way contrary to the way I pronounce it. Even if it were based on RP I'd have some disagreement: poor-pure split, /r{T/ not /rQT/ for wrath, /i:/ not /aI/ for either, /Q/ not /@U/ for sloth, /sk/ not /S/ for schedule, and a few others. As I look through this there's a few words where I favour US patterns rather than UK ones (mostly British ones, admittedly).

Just as long as the range of possibilities of how a word is spoken is reduced, I don't mind which accent is used as a standard; I can always use spellcheck to put me right.

No, not at all. If something is necessary, it cannot but happen - that's what 'necessary' means. The fact that it has not happened proves that it has not so far been necessary, and the fact that there seems to be no imminent prospect of it happening gives us strong reason to believe it will not prove necessary in the foreseeable future either.
I think you might be confusing 'necessary' with 'something I personally would sort of like'. Which is fair enough, semantic drift and all that, but it does rather take away from the force of your earlier declaration.

If something is necessary, it doesn't always happen. I needed to stop biting my nails when I was a kid, but that didn't happen until recently (and even then I nibble still). The necessity of something involves recognition of it. I could need something right now, but if I don't recognise what it is, I'm not going to bother about it. There's been a few moments in my life when I realised I needed something retrospectively (taking a bottle of water on extremely hot days, eat something before starting to work, etc). By then it's too late. But I learn.

As far as spelling reforms, most people don't see it as necessary (otherwise, as you rightly point out, it would change), and some people do. That is what makes it subjective. Personally, I don't need a spelling reform; I can live with the present orthography, even if I do make mistakes. However, I do feel that a spelling reform to simplify and/or regularise English spelling would be better. This is my personal view, and I don't think of it as "objective fact". Once a spelling reform takes hold things could get worse or make very little difference at all, and then I'd have to recognise that I was mistaken in my belief.

This assumes that a) it genuinely is harder to teach English than other languages, and b) that this is a problem. On the first, I don't think you can fairly compare, because of the shitness (and general differentness) of the English educational system compared to European systems. It's well known that our 'bung them into school as soon as they can walk and then give them standardised tests every three months, and if possible get them to stay in school from dawn to dusk to prevent any contact with the parents' approach gives substantially sub-optimal results both in psychological well-being and even in education achievement. Of course English children are slower at learning to read - they're slower at everything. [And no, I don't think introducing a 'phonics' system that works great at teaching kids to read perfectly phonetic orthographies will greatly improve matters - the objective of that policy is more a 'no child left behind', minimise-failure target, rather than maximising learning speed for the majority].
On b) - well, bilingual children also have slower language learning, but that's not necessarily considered a problem.

Exactly why there should be studies. There have been studies showing that learning to read and write English takes longer than in other languages. Now there should be studies to verify why, and eliminate the possibilities. It should be researched to deth.

[jmcd]

This assumes that a) it genuinely is harder to teach English than other languages, and b) that this is a problem. On the first, I don't think you can fairly compare, because of the shitness (and general differentness) of the English educational system compared to European systems. It's well known that our 'bung them into school as soon as they can walk and then give them standardised tests every three months, and if possible get them to stay in school from dawn to dusk to prevent any contact with the parents' approach gives substantially sub-optimal results both in psychological well-being and even in education achievement. Of course English children are slower at learning to read - they're slower at everything.

Except that it's not just English kids that are slower at learning English orthography, it's English speakers. Also, as can be seen in the study I posted in my previous post, speed in orthography learning is directly correlated with depth of orthography, not quality of education system (Danish and French are the runners-up after all, not Hungary or the Czech Republic).

On b) - well, bilingual children also have slower language learning, but that's not necessarily considered a problem.

That would be outdated ideas. Modern research shows that there is little or no difference in language learning speed between monolinguals and bilinguals.

[ol bofosh]

Maybe taking longer to learn an orthography isn't a problem in itself, but it seems to me an advantage to have an orthography that needs less time, less energy and less money to learn; that's time, energy and money that could go into learning other things.