[Caesar Soze]

You're getting lots of criticism, most of it, I think, ill-deserved. Are you attempting to "dumb down" English spelling? Possibly. Why is that a bad thing? Shouldn't everyday tasks like spelling be simplified as much as possible? Try telling some Freepers to go back to DOS or a bash shell because their GUI "dumbs down" their computer. (Okay, a few would be happy with the bash shell.) Or maybe we should replace the red/yellow/green stoplights with monochromatic text signs that say, stop/get ready to stop, or just stop, depending on state law/go? Dumbing things down is often a very good thing.

I can't fully back your plan, though. Modern English spelling has a few benefits you may be overlooking.

1. Ambiguity in pronunciation. Would a word like "white" be spelled wiet, hwiet, or whiet in your system? Different English-speakers give a different amount of aspiration to the w. Ant or Awnt? Et cetera.
2. Built-in etymologies. I know that croissant is from French, and xenophobia from Greek. I wouldn't if they were spelled kwossan (how *do* you get that nasal sound in your system?) or zeenuhfobieyuh.
3. A brief alphabet. To accurately represent all the sounds used by English speakers, we'd have to adopt the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet, although India Pale Ale helps with this). And we can't sing the IPA to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."

These aren't knock-out reasons, but they're food for thought before any major, government-mandated spelling reform.

(It may make you feel better to know that the language is evolving -- when I was in the spelling bee lo those many years ago, 'dialog' was accepted, and both spellings of 'judgment' seem kosher.)

[Spellfix]

Thanks for a thoughtful response.

Regarding regional pronunciations, see #101.

SoundSpel is basically ITA with the combined letters separated again.

It is true that the etymologies are partially lost with reform. However, other languages respell foreign words according to their rules, so they get pronounced right. And our spelling does a lot of harm to "origins". We often use bad rules and end up pronouncing foreign words wrongly. I saw a sign in Greece for a "Keramics Studio" "Ceramics" is a Greek word and we used the ambiguous "Ce" to spell it, with the result we ended up pronouncing it as S instead of K. As the inventors, the Greeks resent that and want to correct it.

Still, on rare occasions, an etymological scholar would have to look in the dictionary instead of just looking at the word to see the origin. Maybe there are as many as three scholars who would be inconvenienced twice a week by that. But in the US alone are 40,000,000 functional illiterates who need to read, every day of the week. I think they are more important.

As I have said in other responses, no one wants the government to mandate that everyone must use SoundSpel. Most people would continue to use regular spelling as long as they lived.