Spelling is ruining the English language

[DanaC]

How can you possibly know that disadvantage would be great enough to make it greater than the potential advantages? How can you, without seeing any detail, form the opinion that spelling reform must create disadvantage no matter what the changes may be? How can you claim to speak for everyone when you are only going by your own experiences, and the experiences of a few people you know? That is an awfully small sample in comparison to the hundreds of millions that speak English as native speakers.

I can't. And neither can you. But the system we have is the system we have. We have no way to know that intorducing a new system wouldn't cause greater harm. And I can only really judge my own experience and those of a small group of people. But the hundreds of millions of English speakers are not an amorphous mass; they are made of of lots of small groups each with their own experience of the language and no more reducible to a formula for change than they are to a formula for stasis.

As to which of the spellings I find easier to read: the ones with the 'ough'. Because that's what I am comfortable with. The second set of words jar for me and were I to find them in a piece of writing they would startle me from the text.

'Who decides what is correct now' Well, currently it appears to be a combination of 'official' dictionaries, netwide calls for updated information on spelling trends (conducted by the OED amongst others) and the rather more democratic sweep of natural change over time. All conducted on an uneven and unequal playing field arrived at after many generations of evolution, control, downright dishonesty, political and ideological movements and the arbitrary timing of the codifying of spelling through the printing press.

What you are suggesting is as artificial and 'top down' as the drive to latinize our spellings and grammar ever was. It will also irritate as many people as it will please, and appears to take no account of the profoundly political and nationalist elements of 'spelling'.