My only comment about the controversy in #747 is that the chief problem
now with respelling the English language would be the choosing of which
dialect of English to standardize its spelling on.
Some languages have it easier. Spanish spelling is standardized on the
ceceo-lleista Castilian dialect, and those who don't pronounce <S> and
<Z> differently and don't pronounce <LL> and <Y> differently have to
learn when to write which letters in which words. (Sometimes a failure
to do so reveals those who have not had much formal education in their
language.) I think I was once told that the Netherlandish language is
respelled officially every few decades, following its Amsterdam
standard, and that one can often tell how old people are (i.e. when they
were in elementary school) by how they spell certain words. But all of
the variatons are officially accepted, and reasonably well educated
people can read all of them, and eventually the old spellings die out
along with those who wrote them.
Since I am known to be interested in the scientific study of writing
systems, I have some colleagues who try, from time to time, to tell me
that I should devote myself to having the English language respelled.
Fortunately, I have an easy answer to that exhortation: I ask them how I
should spell the three-letter word meaning a canine, and whether I
should spell it DAG. The point is that my idiolect (characteristic of
northeastern Kansas and some other parts of the country) does not have
an open-o phoneme. (I do have open-o as an allophone of /a/ after /w/
and before /l/, but it isn't a phoneme.)
For better or worse, we're stuck with traditional English spelling.
Personally, though (or tho) I think that Miss Fidditch might do well to
accept some of the more obvious adjustments to reality that are common,
such as THO, THRU, and LITE. That GH that wrote the Middle English
voiceless velar fricative deserves to go, altho(ugh) the Scots who still
pronounce it may want to keep it.