If we were to reform our spelling, we would lose much meaning. How would you differentiate between sight, site, cite, and cyte?
How do you differentiate them when you hear them? By context?
A couple of examples from the Spanish language:
se: general purpose pronoun you use everywhere
sé: "I know."
que: that
qué: what?
de: of
dé: present first person subjuctive of "to give"
If it is important, you can use accents in some cases to differentiate words. But generally, you will use context. All of the above word pairs sound exactly the same, but they are easily differentiated by their context. The same could be done in English. We already do that for most of our words anyways. How many words that you normally use have only one meaning? And of those meanings, how many variations exist?
Do you really believe most students even understand the etymology of the word 'the'? From 'se', 'seo', and 'þæt' in Old English to 'þe' in Middle English to 'the' today? I doubt it. And why do we care? Do we need all of our students to be linguists?
If we were to reform our spelling, we would lose much meaning. How would you differentiate between sight, site, cite, and cyte?
Well said. English is an exceptionally powerful language because we're not sticklers on where words come from, or their history, or some silly list of rules of how things "should" be done. If we find a word that better describes something than what we had available to us, we take it and make it our own.
Witness the French obsession with their language. You see, they have nothing left. We have bigger horizons.