Quote:
Originally Posted by Undertoad
All my life I've spelt viola with a io. Now I have to learn a new way?
What's harder, learning or re-learning? And that's one problem with this modest proposal; having learned English during the period when the brain is in its formative years, re-learning will be harder for everyone.
|
You raise a good point here. Once one gets to be a certain age, the ability to learn diminishes. For this reason, it is usual for spelling reforms in other languages to be optional for those who have mastered the current orthography. In some languages that have regular maintenance of their spellings, one can guess the approximate age of a writer by the spellings they use in certain words.
The ability to read any new spellings is not likely to be compromised much. Anyone who reads much fiction will encounter intentional nonstandard spellings in works by contemporary authors from time to time, whether it is eye dialect to convey the exact manner of speech of a particular character, or Terry Pratchett's use of nonstandard spellings in the Discworld series in a medieval or semi-educated style. In Discworld, we have such spellings as Granny Weatherwax's instructions on a bottle of medicine: "Onne Spoon Onlie and that Smalle", or the "cagèd whale" in
Guards! Guards!. Authors would not use such spellings if they received too many complaints, their editors told them to revise the spellings, or the books didn't sell.