I've been reading some of the messages on this topic, and have not noticed
a mention of one aspect that seems significant: It seems that most
proposals for re-spelling do great violence to what literate people
recognize to be the language; it looks almost like cultural vandalism,
although that is surely not the intent of those who would have us change.
(At the moment, I'm not sure that "reform" is an appropriate term, but
that's probably my oddball mindset.)

I'm quite at a loss to explain why the existing spellings are "agreeable",
or "comfortable" to literate people; surely simplicity and consistency are
not the primary virtues. Moreover, new spellings seem to delete all
"embedded history", somewhat akin to the (sometimes) decades of
handwritten annotations that were lost when library catalog cards were
designated as scrap, or recycled.

It seems to me that we are subconsciously fond of our written language's
inconsistencies and quirks. It also seems that the French, for instance,
love theirs!

===

One subscriber, btw, seems to be reliably committed to the commonplace
replacement of "than" by "then", as in "more then enough". This change
seems too commonplace to be "undone"; there's a consensus of sorts among
many people that this is the way to spell the word. As an amateur, I'd say
that the vowel is a "schwa", obscuring the change implied by the new
spelling.

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
Hope for these times: Paul Rogat Loeb's book --
"The Impossible Will Take a Little While:..."