Why has English spelling reform never caught on? [duplicate]
Solution 1:
Yes, it's the history of the language, its complexity, etc. And the Initial Teaching Alphabet failed over here, too. But, above all, the English character was historically too individualistic - or should I simply say belligerent? - to conform. I'm not sure how prescriptive Johnson's Dictionary was for the eighteenth century; but a regularisation of spelling was, of course, one consequence of universal elementary education in the later nineteenth century. The full answer would take (and has taken) several books.
Solution 2:
In the late 1960's in the US, an educational experiment was implemented in many elementary schools. It was hypothesized that spelling English phonetically would speed up the reading and comprehension progress of young students. (I guess they were hoping that the "simplified" version would expand and continue on its own.)
It was a colossal failure. By fifth grade, the kids in our neighborhood who were in the program were about two years behind, and the parents were screaming bloody murder. (You'd think they would have learned their lesson with "Esperanto".)
(Sorry, I don't remember what the program was called.)
I guess you can't implement something like that because it's hard to pick a starting place. (Also, people generally don't like having things shoved down their throats.) Interestingly, the texting craze has begun the process in a way that will probably become permanent within a few generations. (Guess all the old books will be useless - can't wait to see the Bible.)
Solution 3:
There are a number of barriers in the development and implementation of a reformed orthography for English: (from Wikipedia)
Public resistance to spelling reform has been consistently strong, at least since the early 19th century, when spelling was codified by the influential English dictionaries of Samuel Johnson (1755) and Noah Webster (1806).
English vocabulary is mostly a melding of Germanic, French, Latin and Greek words, which have very different phonemes and approaches to spelling. Some reform proposals tend to favor one approach over the other, resulting in a large percentage of words that must change spelling to fit the new scheme.
Some inflections are pronounced differently in different words. For example, plural -s and possessive -'s are both pronounced differently in cat(')s (/s/) and dog(')s (/z/). The handling of this particular difficulty distinguishes morphemic proposals, which tend to spell such inflectional endings the same, from phonemic proposals that spell the endings according to their pronunciation.
English is the only one of the top ten major languages that lacks a worldwide regulatory body with the power to promulgate spelling changes.
The spellings of some words – such as tongue and stomach – are so unindicative of their pronunciation that changing the spelling would noticeably change the shape of the word. Likewise, the irregular spelling of very common words such as is, are, have, done and of makes it difficult to fix them without introducing a noticeable change to the appearance of English text. This would create acceptance issues.
Spelling reform may make pre-reform writings harder to understand and read in their original form, often necessitating transcription and republication. Today, few people choose to read old literature in the original spellings as most of it has been republished in modern spellings.[28]