Iain--
A complete overhaul of English spelling is probably both mechanically
and socially impossible, but that's no reason to give up trying to at
least improve it. It's true that pronunciation is always changing, but
it doesn't change so quickly that the spellings can't eventually catch
up. It's also true that pronunciations differ from place to place, but
we live with different US/UK spellings now; there's no reason we can't
have "labratory" in the US and "laboratry" in the UK. That would make
more sense than "color" and "colour."
The craziness of English spelling is an enormous barrier to children
and foreigners trying to learn the language. It makes it very difficult
to learn how to correctly pronounce a word when the same spelling may
have different pronunciations (heard / beard, war / car) and to
correctly spell a word when the same sound may be spelled several
different ways (they're, their, there; to, too, two, tu-tu). When
perfectly intelligent, well-educated adults misspell words all the time
(such as anomalous, permanent, and fluctuant) that should be a signal
that we need to reconsider the wisdom of our "nearly perfect" system.
Some simple changes (fixing the EA problem, GH problem, and
letter-doubling problem, for example) would maintain the look of
English and yet make it much more regular. The "TION"-type spellings
help many foreign learners and are regular and predictable, so there's
no reason to get rid of them.
=D=
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