Hi dorayakii,
Sorry if I sound too serious about this issue, but I just couldn't resist posting my enlightened views on this thread. LOL.
Until recently such a reform would have made life easier for the average English user. But now I actually think if English spelling (or any other natural language spelling system) was to be changed, it shouldn't just be changed to achieve a greater correspondence between sound and spelling. Rather, it should be adjusted for greater grammatical/semantic consistency and disambiguation. This would make spelling slightly more difficult for poor spellers but infinitely more understandable for machines, which is what really counts in today's world.
Trying to simplify things for poor spellers could actually cause more harm than good.
1) First of all you can't forget that the order of the letters doesn't matter as long as you have enough context to figure out the meaning of the word.
2) The order of the letters isn't the biggest problem for poor spellers. Usually they have problems with homographs/homophones/homonyms such as 'bear - bare', 'bow - bow', their - there - they're, it's - its, etc.
3) If you 'simplify' things by merging homophones into single spelling forms, for instance, if you merge 'bear' and 'bare' to 'ber', then you'll seriously cripple the efficiency of all sorts of search engines and data storage systems which will be unable to recognize these differences anymore. Imagine googling for 'bare bear' as 'ber ber'. (Now who could ever do that in the first place.) LOL.
4) Spellcheckers help you in most situation already so spelling is not that much of a problem, except on discussion boards where we don't bother that much to spellcheck before posting.
5) Spellcheckers are becoming increasingly 'intelligent' in allowing for the grammar and semantics surrounding the misspelled word. In the nearest future they will not only tell you if the word exists or doesn't exist in the dictionary, but also whether you should spell the word 'bear' or 'bare' in a given context (with both forms attested in the dictionary).
6) Any normative attempts to reform the spelling of an internationally used language such as English are out of touch with reality. It's simply impossible to snap your fingers and say: "Ok, Brits, Yanks, Ozzies, Zealanders, Nigerians, Hindus, Pakistanis, Canadians, and all the non-native speakers. From now one we spell 'bare' as 'ber'." Especially if you consider the fact that there are differences between accents of English and that some changes would make sense in American English but not in British English, and vice versa.
So, in a nutshell, we're deep in sh**t and any attempts to change the situation globally and radically would only sink us deeper in it.
Pole
EDITED TO CORRECT A SILLY SPELLING MISTAKE. LOL
