The problem for the SSS is that most peeple ar not aware of the educational disadvantages which stem from spelling inconsistencies or how they came about.

This makes it like any other human language, full of features that seem illogical but add up to a whole that works for human beings.

I did not begin to lern English until the age of 14, and the onely linguistic aspects I found tricky wer idiomatic expressions like "get off, back up, turn up". - "I have been" and "I went" wer easy. The difference between them is consistent and logical.

I cannot agree that it is absolutely easier or more difficult than any other language: it depends on what first language you start from and many other circumstances of learning.

Perhaps you could explain how any changes to spelling would affect the issue of English globally and how you would change spelling in a way that would help children and not hinder the rest of the English-using world?

In English, even practised newsreaders occasionally still mispronounce words. (I hav herd Anna Ford struggle with "counterfeited" or "reneging"). That's why moast English speakers stick to a fairly simple vocabulary.

ITA also left far fewer children making the sort of really poor progress that invariably occurs with normal English spelling.

The rest we link to sounds via a complex system of rules that relate the letter "a" to particular sounds in "at", "tart", "date", "away" etc and that sometimes rely on so-called silent letters like "e" and "u" to show the different spellings of "mat/mate" and "guest/gesture".

There is no advantage in spelling the most often used words unalphabetically. Quite the opposite: the irregular spellings of common words like "to, you, your, very, many" are particularly noxious because they keep undermining the basic English spelling system and so make it harder for children to learn it. If they obeyed the basic English code too [tu, u, yor, verry, menny] they would help them to grasp the whole system much faster.

Children cope with the regular complex spellings, such as "mat - mate, guest - gesture, dine - dinner", easily enough. Their reading and spelling difficulties are all caused by random irregular spellings: laid, paid - said; our, sour - your; chat, chart - character; fatter, latter, late, latent - lateral.

By the way most Chinese characters are no more pictures than are English letters - turn a capital "A" upside down and you will see the animal it once pictured, as remote from its origins as most Chinese characters.

Spellings that make learning to read, and therefor getting a footing onto the road to educational success, exeptionally difficult ar particularly nasty. Having to waste time on memorising thousands of quirky spellings wun by wun is of no bennefit tu ennywun either. I can sugest a cupl of simpl mesures for reducing this lerning burden verry substantially too.

What spelling reform would do is drastically reduce the time it takes children to learn to read and write, thereby cutting teaching costs and freeing up time for other. More importantly still, it would reduce our high rate of functional illiteracy which has persisted at around 20% for at least a century and keeps entailing enormous costs. In Finland it is just 4%, in Sweden 8% and in Germany 10%.

Even just shedding the surplus letters from 100 of them, as in "friend- frend, beautiful - butiful, slow - slo, have - hav" would make initial phonics teaching much easier and mor succesful than it is now. And a brief look at those words makes it clear that regional differences in pronunciation ar not a barrier to this, and there ar not menny such difrences ennyway.

The cost of any change would be astronomical. Imagine the number of books in English that would need to be changed. If they were not changed the children taught by the new system would be effectively cut off from their written heritage. Imagine the conversion of every computer, every programme written in English.