Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
... And now you can't spell the difference between the a in 'car' and the a in 'cat'.
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Of course we can. When followed by an R, A always has the sound in ‘car’.
Look: English is the first language of several hundred million people, and a second language used by perhaps a billion more. It is spoken with dozens of different dialects, some of them almost mutually incomprehensible. Any attempt to spell English phonetically would instantly smash to pieces on the rock of, ‘Phonetically according to which dialect?’ So we haven't changed the spellings, generally speaking, since we standardized them about 300 years ago. That means that the entire body of written English over that time is accessible to all English-speakers everywhere. And since literature is the one art form in which the English-speaking peoples are generally admitted to excel, that's worth a lot more than just making the spelling easier for speakers of one dialect.
Get back to us when you have countries on every inhabited continent using Finnish as their official language, and more books and documents written in Finnish than in any other language in history. I doubt you'll handle it any better than we have.
