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Comment by anticristi | Hacker News Reader

So basically English spelling is trapped in a local minimum. An small change will make spelling closer to some dialect, and further from most other dialects. The current situation is suboptimal for everyone, but at least it's a Nash equilibrium.

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That's certainly true for things like vowels, but there are other situations where spelling could be changed with no ambiguity problems in any dialect. For example, basically every word that contains "gh" can be simplified, as <gh> represents a /x/ sound like German "Bach" that dropped out of the language in the 1200s. Nobody is confused by "tho" and "thru".

Another easy example is just fixing "island". The <s> was never pronounced. Medieval scribes put it there because they incorrectly guessed that the word was related to Latin "insula".

I personally think there's a lot of room for improvements that would work in nearly all English dialects. The "ough" mess, for example, could stand some clean up. But in general, yes, there is too much variation in English around the world to "fix" it now.

You're hitting the phonological analogue of Moravec's law: the "ough" mess is precisely the kind of thing that can't easily be simplified in a way that works across English dialects. It hits a wide swath of basic vocabulary that originally had a small range of slightly awkward pronunciations that diverged in descendant English. Different dialects don't split those pronunciations the same way.

The real low-hanging fruit is getting the British to give up on those spellings that follow a dead branch of French ;-)

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