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> If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said

That's because at that time they still wrote phonetically. Today the spelling of some languages, like English especially, is fixed and immutable yet the pronunciation diverges.

Think about equATION and pronunciATION (or any other word ending in -ation that has "ʒ" instead of "ʃ").

There is also the reverse effect. Spelling influences pronunciation. Especially the sounds of single vowels (a,e,i,o,u), their sound being used frequently when spelling, becomes a guide to pronounce unfamiliar words, making words like "fungae" sounds nothing like what the latin word used to be (and how it was probably pronounced by english speaking educated people in the middle ages).

That said, even a crippled phonetic alphabet is certainly easier to learn than ideograms. However English is at the worst end of the spectrum. Japanese syllabic writing systems (hiragana and katakana) are much easier to write even if they have a few more glyphs. Unfortunately, even if you master -kana scripts, and thus able to write everything you want in Japanese, you'd be cut off from mainstream culture, including newspapers street signs etc

> But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). Maybe this fragmentation would be much less if they had a phonetic writing system in the first place.

This is why Latin, which had such an alphabet, didn't split into mutually unintelligible dialects like Romanian, Spanish, and French, right?

> We can still read old texts, even though our pronunciation of the words has changed vastly. If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said, but practically speaking I don't see this as a big problem.

But this wouldn't be the case if we wrote English phonetically today.

For example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/Gawain?rgn=main;view=fulltex...) is one of my favorite pieces of Middle English literature, and exactly contemporary to Chaucer. It's hard enough to read without some knowledge of Middle English but you'd be totally lost if we wrote nait instead of knight.

>Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.).

The different "dialects" are really different languages altogether (certainly as different as the various Romance languages, for example). It seems unlikely that a country as vast and diverse as China would have become monolingual just if they'd used a different writing system.

> mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.)

But the trick is that when written on paper these dialects are mostly mutally intelligible.